• THE SUPPORT OF MILLENNIAL & GEN ZERS FOR SOCIALIST CONCEPTS HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, with over 72% now supporting resurgence of trade unions – in major retail & food outlets, non-profits, museums, state legislatures, even minor league baseball teams – just reported by Gallup’s Labor Day Poll.  Much of the reason is the “ideological shift during an economy that has been particularly dysfunction for them… a result of the grindingly slow recovery from 2008 Great Recession in such a haphazard and incomplete way that their net worth trails earlier generations… Major impacts have been: (1) Jobs and pay cuts hitting the public sector: (2) Reduced teacher ranks & wages from substituting grad students & non-tenured as faculty; (3) Job markets for college grads who had flocked to humanities & social science finding shriveling opportunities in journalism, publishing, or academia; and (4) Student debt rising accordingly… Young aspiring professionals now constitute the grad student unions steadily growing at universities,” so expect the ideology to further increase.  [AMERICAN PROSPECT – 9/5/22]
  • 75% OF AMERICANS LIVE IN STATES THAT ARE RULED BY A SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY, with once-elected officials who redraw electoral maps in order to remain self-perpetuating and allow them to pursue “perverse incentives, unworried about losing a general election as long as they don’t offend their supporters.” The impact is complete unwillingness to ‘compromise’ on social issues – a range including carbon emission/ homeless vagrancy/ policing/ incarceration of law-breakers/ gun rights/ abortion/ and how race or sex education gets discussed in children’s’ classrooms.  Without reasonable compromise, the disenchantment of almost everyone is to some degree inevitable, which leads to local districts and states becoming “Petrie dishes of polarization,” with dysfunctional leadership unwilling & unable  to resolve the matters  that people expect – much less the national issues like immigration/ taxation/ security.  As confidence in the American electoral process continues to evaporate, Electoral Reform should perhaps be the critical priority.  [ECONOMIST – 9/3/22]
  • “THE ‘GREAT RESET’ OF RENEWABLE ENERGY IS IN PLAY, as radical environmentalism puts a mythical ‘earth’ above the needs of people, and has become a secular religion that will likely kill a lot of people in the process… Elon Musk spoke last week at a Norway energy conference, advising that rushing to sustainable energy transition is premature – both (1) ‘insane from a national security standpoint,’ and (2) that without oil and gas ‘Civilization will crumble,’ since just about everything that provides our high standard of living is almost totally dependent on fossil fuels (even solar panels & windmills which could not be made with that energy)… Meanwhile, hubris-infected green-energy politicians & bureaucrats in California, attempting to lead the nation by pushing government-forced regulation for Zero Emission vehicles, can only lead the state into an economic abyss brought forth by grand illusions.”  [PRICKLY PEAR – 2/2/22]
  • ‘IMAGE SYNTHESIS’ GENERATION MODELS ARE IS NOW AVAILABLE, allowing anyone with a PC to “conjure up almost any visual reality they can imagine, imitating virtually any visual style by feeding a descriptive phrase, with results appearing on the screen like magic… Dozens of products now arguably bring implications as big as the invention of the camera – or perhaps creation of visual art itself. Even our sense of history might be at stake from this new wave of deep learning creative tools that are posed to revolutionize the creation of visual media much like Adobe Photoshop did in the 1990s.”  Beyond issues about authorship & copyright of the hundreds of millions of images pulled by Artificial Intelligence, are concerns of the danger from propaganda/ misinformation/ destroyed value of photo or video Evidence/ character attacks/ impersonation (‘deepflakes’)/ and “tampering with history itself… In this new AI-powered future, how will anyone know if any remotely produced piece of media came from an actual camera, or if actually communicating with a real human?”   [ARS TECHNICA – 9/6/22]
  •  THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

 “We in America are regressing—now returning to the distant neanderthal past, now embracing the worst of what the 19th and 20th century had to offer. There is no end of history. Instead, civilization is a constant fight to embrace what has worked for the common good through the ages—and to reject what in the past has failed abysmally. Bad and bankrupt ideas, protocols, and ideologies—like McCarthyism, communism, various cults, or fascism—resurface not because of their intrinsic or lasting value or record of success, but because civilizations become less vigilant and allow human vanities, ignorance, arrogance, and evil to reassert themselves.” [VICTOR DAVIS HANSON] 

Definition realities: FAITH – on the day of prayer for rain, the person who comes with an umbrella. TRUTH – kids laughing when thrown in the air because they know they’ll be caught. HOPE – going to bed with no assurance of being alive the next morning, but still setting the alarm to wake. CONFIDENCE – planning big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future. LOVE – seeing the world suffering, perhaps imploding, but still getting married and having children. ATTITUDE – reaching 80 years old, but believing it as 16 with 64 years of experience.  

A very unusual youngster and pet performance:  https://biggeekdad.com/2020/09/dog-rocks-out/