Autonomous Racism

 Several years ago in my hometown and the area around it, we had an absolute slew of public meetings in an effort to decide what our area was going to be.  Were we going to be an extension of the campy tourism that attracted hordes to Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge?  Were we going to be a tourist trap with a different set of lures?  What if we didn’t want to be a tourist trap at all, what then?

A lot of opinions were expressed and notes were taken.  Plans were developed.  Some of them were immediately discarded but others made it further along in the process before being discarded.  A few came to some level of fruition. 

One of the ideas was developed into a concept and some conceptual drawings were made for the benefit of those of us whose internal graphic generator doesn’t function as well as your average architect’s.  The architects & developers chose to present one of the concepts with a large PR push to help sell it.  The concept was graphically revealed during a program at a recently renovated theater.  

I was there in the theater, near the back of the main seating area. When they unveiled the artist’s rendering of how their project would look, I reacted verbally loud enough for those in my immediate vicinity to hear although I was mostly talking to myself.  I said something to the effect that “apparently Black people will not be welcome”.  I said that because the artist’s rendering was liberally populated with people but all of the depictions appeared to be of white people.  There was some strained laughter in response to my comment and again, only the folks sitting about three or four folks in either direction would have heard me in that 1500 seat theater.  Still, a week or so later when I saw another version of that artist’s rendering posted publicly, it contained what appeared to be depictions of Blacks and other minorities along with the whites.

I am not of the opinion that my casual linguistic expectoration somehow interrupted a sneakily planned racist act.  As a matter of fact, I do not have any reason to believe there was any racist intent at all.  That’s a problem in itself.  Neither the artist, the architect, the developer or the money people they showed it to first saw a problem.  Not one of them (and yes, I acknowledge they might have served more than one role) noticed the absence of their neighbors of color when presented with the graphic.  If you ever need a clear example of institutional racism, there it is.  There was no racist intent because there didn’t need to be.  The lack of intent however, does nothing to stop an act or behavior from having a racist effect.

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A while back I expressed to a friend that the first time I ever saw a Black person on television for something that had nothing to do with being Black, it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining something about an astrophysical event that was going on and that it happened well after my exit from the USN in 1983.  My friend concluded that I must be misremembering.  Now, I have no idea why that was their kneejerk response.  Perhaps they could recall several instances of that happening and I just didn’t see it.  Perhaps it was simply a “That can’t be right” moment.

In the end, the response doesn’t matter.  What matters is the effect experienced by all of those who could make a claim similar to mine.  It is a particularly insidious form of racism which, like the theater reveal, does not necessarily result from racist intent.  It has been taught in several disciplines for a long time that you can’t do what you can’t see yourself doing.  You have to be able to mentally visualize yourself doing a flip or a jump or a kick or beating a time record etc etc.  When young me watched television or movies, the folks who did stuff were white, criminals were “other”.  Scientists?  White and male most every time.  Drug dealers?  “Others” most every time.  

Consider how many folk might have made amazing contributions to the nation or to humanity in general if only they had known they had the ability.  Plenty of minorities have done amazing things in this nation and elsewhere.  They have overcome the issues I describe and probably several others.  Imagine what they might have done if instead of wasting time and energy “overcoming” the various obstacles - whether they were intentionally or unintentionally placed, they instead started from a position of confidence and encouragement.  Racism takes on a life of its own.  It reaches a stage where no driver or decision is needed, no intent need be expressed.  It is built into the system and it keeps working unless steps are taken to stop it.  It effectively becomes autonomous.

Things are better now than they were in the early stages of my lifetime.  Images of minorities as successful people are not difficult to find. But if you think racism is over, especially institutional racism, do a Google image search on the phrase “welfare queen”.  Do that with the knowledge that the majority of folks on welfare in the USA are white people.  

The engineer in me feels the strong urge to remind you that “better” is not the same as “all good” or “perfect”.  It may be heading in that direction but it aint there yet.  The Voting Rights Act made things better for minorities.  The effect was dynamic rather than static and it had a tendency to spread.  But while it made things better, there is still a significant amount of work to be done.  The Google search I suggest above is not the only example of that by far but it is an example of it.  The VRA’s work is not done and anyone who actually looked and was honest with themselves would not need that explained to them.  Tennessee’s governor and other state politicians clearly have no desire for honesty, either expressed to them or from them.  Unfortunately, TN is not unique.

The VRA was a known entity.  It was peaceful, predictable and not punitive.  I do not know what comes next.  In that not knowing, neither I nor anyone I know is willing to guarantee that the next thing will meet those criteria.  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy

 

TED Truths

 I found the content of this talk to be comforting.  The idea of humans who don't understand or have a clear and coherent definition of consciousness being able to create it has obvious undesirable elements.  Imagine a cave man getting his hands on a nuclear weapon.  He could kill and cook his mastodon in one fell swoop.  Also everything near and not so near the mastodon most likely including the cave man.

Anil Seth does a pretty good job of suggesting that we are unlikely to have to face the modern equivalent of that scenario in the near future.  Again, I find his reasoning comforting.

See the TED talk here.

Projection Protection

 During my time in the USN, I went to sea several times on several different ships.  I have been all over the Mediterranean and seen a goodly portion of the North Atlantic.  Sometimes the ship anchored out of sight of land.  Sometimes we basically cut large circles in the water.

Whether we were sitting still, moving slowly, or traveling at “operational” speed there is one thing in particular that we were NOT doing.  We were not protecting the ocean.  We were not there to stop others from using the ocean near us.  As a matter of fact, we quite frequently shared the ocean immediately around us with other vessels commercial, military or recreational from any number of nations.

But if we were not there to protect the ocean in whole or in part, why were we there??  We were there to prove we could be there.  We were there so that if something happened closer to there than to our nation, we could respond (assuming a response was necessary) more quickly than a response that had to come from the USA proper.  In government/military speak, we were there to “force project”.  We also are typically very visible so as to let others know that we can force project at will.

It is not necessarily obvious but the Army works that way too.  When we either establish an American base or are granted significant access to a foreign ally’s base, we are not doing it to protect that particular bit of geography or the local inhabitants.  Our primary purpose will be to force project.  The Philippine Islands were not in particular danger of being invaded or assaulted.  We put multiple bases there anyway.  We did it so we did not have to respond to Asian issues from the USA.  

There are secondary and tertiary reasons for those bases.  The economic benefit to the area can be significant but, it is generally a side effect.  

We do not have bases in Germany because we think Hitler might not be gone for good.  We have them to enable a quick and effective response to issues affecting our European allies and by extension, us.  The primary threat consideration for those bases has been the Soviet/Russian/Eastern Bloc nations.  

Removing a base or simply reassigning the soldiers from that base does not directly endanger the area immediately around that base.  It does diminish our ability to force project.  It does diminish our ability to present a speedy response to threats coming from that general direction.  It effectively makes our nation weaker and less secure.

Sometimes a base outlives its usefulness.  Political and national alliances have been known to change.  Technological changes can render a base significantly less useful.  But the core truths do not change.  The removal of several thousand troops from any given European base might well cause some fiscal and social discomfort to any number of individual Europeans.  But it will not significantly impact the EU.  What it will do is negatively affect our ability to project military power.  It might make some less willing to do business with those who purchase consumable supplies for our deployed military units.  It will hurt us more than it hurts them.

I would suggest that is not sustainable “leadership”.

Betrayal Writ Large

 Belle of the Ranch is fond of communicating any of several truisms.  One of my favorites I hear from her is “Nations don’t have friends, they have interests.”

She does not mention another observable truism.  That being that leaders of nations can be susceptible to influence from specific leaders of other nations or otherwise powerful people.  We observe that in our own “leadership” in which other national leaders appear to have outsized influence.  I could also point out that current leadership in particular appears to be especially vulnerable to flattery and useless gifts of frippery.

A reasonable assessment of the motivation(s) for our current military involvement in Iran would suggest that Bibi Netanyahu was very instrumental in convincing Felon47 to commit huge amounts of national treasure and no few lives of USA citizens for gains we will not need to brag about.

I could of course, go on about any of several current and former national leaders with autocratic tendencies who dubiously earned the admiration of the guy trying to destroy our nation for profit.

But for as betrayed as I might personally feel, there are those who have been betrayed far worse.  I’m thinking specifically of Iran and their leaders.  I would have to include the religious leadership, the Republican Guard, and the military leadership.  As much as Felon47 appears to be under the direct control and influence of Vladimir Putin, it is difficult for me to conceptualize the situation wherein he commits us to violence in Iran and the Strait without the express permission of Putin.  The same Putin who has been counting on Iran for drones and electronics and other goods to help them in their doomed-to-failure “special military action” in Ukraine.

I’m serious.  While run of the mill Russians may be starting to doubt Putin’s competence, they have been conditioned to believe whatever he tells them.  Iranians may have been conditioned but NOT to believe or revere Putin.  Were I in charge of the military in Iran, I would be developing the plan to grab and relocate Putin immediately upon his political fall or even shortly before.  They are well within reason to believe that he could have ordered Trump to stand down or at least to continue with the status quo wherein we commit the occasional act of terrorism after punishing them for adhering to the internationally agreed upon JCPOA.

International relations are complicated.  I don’t know what was in Putin’s mind.  (Although to be fair, I seriously doubt he values Iranian lives and comforts as much or more than he values the lives of the Russian soldiers he has been using for years now to soak up Ukrainian ammo.)  What I know is that as soon as he perceived his interests as diverging from Iranian interests, he was willing to betray them regardless of what they had done for Russia.

I don’t know where Vlad will go to attempt to escape accountability but, I will be the least surprised person in the world if I wake up to a headline informing me that Persian elements have assisted him in a definitive test of localized gravitic effects.

Is It Soup Yet?

 In several different discussions over the last few weeks, I have compared the state of AI (which I still think would be better described as a Manufactured Intelligence or MI) to the state of transportation in the nation when the Model T was first being sold.  

Imagine you were there for the first sale of a “T” in NYC and you heard the purchaser say “Finally, I can drive to California”.  Perhaps you would consider the fact that the car needed smoother travel surfaces than a horse did and that gave you some doubt.  If you were a time traveler you might note that there were no gas stations and the hardware stores that carried fuel were not guaranteed to be conveniently placed.  Perhaps you might think about the fact that the car and the engine that powered it were fairly new and largely unproven technologies.

If you were able to consider all of those things, you would be hard pressed to come to any conclusion other than that first purchaser was optimistically delusional at best and creatively suicidal at worst.  However, if you were honest with yourself, you could also conclude that if absolutely everything went as well as it could, such a trip was absolutely doable.  Sure, it might take you a month or two but, in theory, it would have been possible even if the failure probability was north of 90%.

Basically, that early adopter would be trying to shortcut evolution.  Our cultural evolution has given us Interstate highways and a vast loose network of refueling locations.  As one who has driven from East TN to CA more than once, I can assure you there were no concerns that I would not be able to find fuel or that a flat tire or other minor mechanical failure would result in the cancellation of the trip.  Though the vehicles I used for the trips I took were far and away more advanced than the Model T, I would suggest that with a moderate amount of proper planning, the probability of catastrophic failure for a Model T to make that trip today is probably less than 40%.  That is with leaving the car the exact same and using the evolved transportation environment.

The use case(s) being pushed or marketed for AI for your average human has them attempting to do that evolution skipping thing.  To accept the uses as marketed, we would have to ignore the fact that LLMs have been delivering fallacious answers to the communication medium being mined by LLMs for answers to our questions. We would have to ignore the fact that there exists among us no few “trolls” who purposefully post wrong or misleading information on that communication medium with the primary or secondary intent of corrupting the answers an AI might deliver.

I am not a Luddite. I firmly believe that there will come a time when the way AI is being marketed will seem reasonable and will reflect their actual and honest abilities.  I firmly believe that there are use cases in specific industries where the AI is currently a useful and reasonable tool.  (AlphaFold anyone?)  But for anything “mission critical” LLMs in their current (and past) state are a risky tool at best.  They should only be used if you are willing to check their work.

Unfortunately, cars and AI are not the only places where we(humanity) are attempting to skip evolution.  One such effort is particularly vexing to me.  The approximate cost so far of the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is $10billion.  That covers development, manufacture, launch, and ongoing operations.  If you happen to be as much of a tech nerd as I am, you will be aware of the massive amount of science that continues to be done on the data being provided by JWST. OTOH, the NASA Artemis program cost has been estimated at approximately $100billion through 2025.  Four really nice people got to take some pretty kewl photos with their mobile phones.  A rough seat of the pants analysis suggests we paid ten times more for a ten thousandth of the science.  Surely I cannot be the only one that sees the problem with this.

A significant percentage of the Artemis cost has to do with the fact that it carried humans and they were nice enough people that we wanted to bring them back safely.  Imagine how much of that cost could have been eliminated if we did not need any life support for the mission.  Imagine that we had included a number of sensors and then left the capsule/sensors in orbit around the Moon.  We could be receiving scientifically valuable data for months or years to come (and sure, yea, occasionally some really pretty pictures of Earth-rise).  Even if we wanted to drop another robot (or five) on the surface, according to the size and complexity, it would be vastly less expensive than Artemis.

I am not a space Luddite either.  I simply believe that an awful lot of what we get from sending astronauts to space would be better done by automated systems.  Astronauts are hugely important for figuring out how going to space affects astronauts.  Other than that, most of what they do, not all by any stretch, could be done less expensively by automation. With the exception of physical sample recovery, the automated systems would not need to be brought back which is itself a significant expenditure.  Rather than wait for a conveniently timed and placed asteroid strike, we could crash the automated craft into the surface for science as we have done on some other missions.

Once we know more about space and science advances in other arenas, we might choose to spend the money to launch humans on extended missions.  For the foreseeable future however, it is my considered opinion that automated missions - whether to the Moon or other bodies or Lagrange points - make far more fiscal AND scientific sense.  Humans and human habitable constructs are not yet ready to do long term work in space and I think our insistence on trying to force the issue is actually retarding our scientific advancement.

I sent everything before this paragraph to a scientist friend to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything out and was reminded that some of the things NASA and other humans do is for marketing.  The engineering aspects of my background lead me to find marketing to be a necessary evil but still an evil. Without humans in the story, the argument goes, other humans will lose interest and will not want tax dollars spent on it. I cannot argue effectively against that but I can say that marketing that increases the costs by a factor of 10 over the actual project costs is something I can and will argue against.  Again, my opposition is rooted in the effort to skip the orderly evolution of a given science.  When it is time, when we are ready, when the science justifies the fiscal and physical risk, I am all in.  For now, I think we need a lot more robotic additives before we declare the mix of space travel ingredients to be soup.

Lying For The Sake of Lying

I asked Google Gemini if the White House Ballroom has ever hosted the WHCD.  Obviously, I was curious because immediately following the latest "event" Felon47 harangued about the fact that such an attempt could not happen in the event space he is attempting illegally construct after having illegally destructed the East Wing.  

If one were to look for an active and recent example of a non-sequitur, this is it.  The ballroom he wants built would not have affected the WHCD in the least.  Felon47 will always attempt to find a way to lie to you.  He doesn't care if it makes sense, he doesn't care if it is relevant, he doesn't care if most of us know it is a lie.  As long as he gets to lie to those that are willing to contort their logic and morals to accommodate him, he is willing to lie to them.

Everything that follows is the response I got from Google.  Feel free to do your own research.

 The short answer is no. Historically, the White House has never hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD) in any of its rooms, including the East Room (which is the closest thing to a "ballroom" the historic residence has).

Here is the breakdown of why that is and how the current landscape is changing:

1. The Separation of Church and State (and Media)

The WHCD is organized by the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA), which is an independent organization of journalists. To maintain a symbolic and professional distance from the administration they cover, the dinner is traditionally held at a neutral, third-party venue.

2. The Capacity Issue

The White House simply hasn't had a room large enough to accommodate the modern dinner.

• The East Room: The largest room in the Executive Residence, it can only seat about 200 guests for dinner.

• The WHCD Scale: The dinner typically draws over 2,500 attendees. For decades, this has made the Washington Hilton (specifically its "International Ballroom") the default home for the event, as it is one of the few spaces in D.C. that can handle the security and size requirements.

3. Recent Developments (2025–2026)

As of early 2026, there has been significant news regarding a "White House Ballroom." President Trump has been pushing for the construction of a new, 90,000-square-foot State Ballroom as part of a modernized East Wing.

Following a security incident at the April 2026 WHCD held at the Washington Hilton, the administration has cited the event's safety risks as a primary reason to move such large-scale gatherings onto the secure grounds of the White House. However, the WHCA has traditionally resisted moving the dinner to the White House to preserve its independence.

Summary of Locations

Era	Typical Venue
1921 (First Dinner)	Arlington Hotel
Mid-20th Century	Various (Willard Hotel, Statler Hilton)
Modern Era	Washington Hilton (The "Hinckley" Hilton)
White House?	Never. Only used for State Dinners, not the WHCD.

The Biggest Lie

      It is an old joke.  Well, technically it is several old jokes.  

Since I am, to my discredit and shame, only familiar with humor traditions of Western culture and in the English language specifically, I acknowledge there may well be far more “biggest lie” jokes than I have been exposed to.

Sometimes it aint a joke.  I have heard the phrase used when humor was the absolute last thing anyone was attempting to communicate.  Sometimes usage of the phrase precedes a verbal or physical altercation.

As a general rule, my experience with the phrase is limited to those two use cases.  It is used either as a joke or as a threat.  That changes today.  Okay, perhaps “today” is minorly disingenuous but, I assure you it is a recent change.

The ironic thing is that I have a maxim for pretty much my entire life that is as deserving of the description “the biggest lie” if anything is.  “All’s fair in love and war” is that maxim.  Until recently I gave it no thought at all.  That lack of thought was justified (in my mind) by the blatant wrongness of the claim.  Anyone who has served in the military knows full well that war has all kinds of rules.  There are also traditions and habits and absolute no nos.  No matter how much you love someone, inflicting physical pain is frowned upon.  Taking fiscal advantage of your love interest is not something you do to impress their family.  Making promises you have no intention of keeping is not typically seen as a loving act.  As it turns out, there are in fact rules in love and war.  There are things that are considered unfair or out of bounds in love, war or business.

All of that is knowledge I would expect most any human to have.  Perhaps we might have to think specifically about a given situation but eventually, we will come to understand that regardless of where you are or what you are doing, there are actions that are unacceptable.  Most every human and plenty of entities in other species appear to know this.  But not Felon47.

A look at Donald John Trump’s life, casual or indepth, leads one inescapably to the conclusion that he actually, honestly lives his life in such a manner as to indicate absolute belief in that flawed maxim.  He openly expresses the desire for those subordinate to him to ignore the laws, local, state, national or international, and carry out his orders or follow his suggestions.  He had sexual affairs with girls or women even while he was ostensibly in monogamous relationships.  He appears to have done it in every allegedly committed relationship he has been in.  It looks for all the world that he fully believes that “All is fair in love and war,”  The evidence that gives lie to the maxim for the majority of humanity, has had no apparent effect on him.

I am starting to think that the reason he lies so frequently and completely is rooted in the fact that he believes whatever he does is perfectly fine within the arenas of love, war, and business.  I suppose I could point out just how incredibly flawed such thinking is but, the other thing that Felon47 demonstrates is a slogan from one of my biker tee shirts.  “If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand”.   A different quote may be even more relevant here  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (also applicable: power) depends on his not understanding it."