A little something to ease you into Christmas Eve, and the spirit thereof.
Month: December 2024
AWOL
It’s bad enough that FJB was a drooling idiot for what seems like his entire presidency, but when it’s one of our Texas gals… WTF is going on in Washington?
Rep. Kay Granger, the first Republican woman to represent a Texas district in the U.S. House of Representatives, has been found in a nursing home that specializes in memory care after having been missing from Congress for about six months.
Granger, 81, who was first elected to the House in 1996, and before that was the mayor of Fort Worth, has not cast a vote in Washington since July. Her absence had generated concern in her district, which is the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area, according to the New York Post.
She was found when a reporter at The Dallas Express got a tip that she had been staying at a memory care facility after being found wandering through her neighborhood while seemingly lost and confused.
FFS, and we could have elected someone errr fresher toot sweet if we’d learned about this back in July…
Somebody in the Republican party — Texas or Washington D.C. — needs to get their ass severely kicked, and it’s not Kay Granger.
News Roundup
As it’s Christmas Eve, our Roundup is going to be extra-special silly today. Some of it may even be true.
...wait; you mean this isn’t how everybody does Christmas dinner?
…we know. It falls off / grows closed, and you turn into an incel mass murderer. Next:
From the Hearts Of Stone Dept.:
...sorry, this just made me giggle. As did this one:
...talk about taking your hobby too seriously. But even better:
...what cynics might call “a good start”.
From the Police Blotter:
...here’s a thought: if we do free “Luigi’, can we jail all the protesters for life instead? It’s only fair.
...anyone giving odds that the car was stolen? What, nobody?
...keywords: New York City and illegal immigrant.
...first: he isn’t a “Brit”, he’s Irish. But I love his defense: The man admitted he was aware of the body but hadn’t reported it to the police because he claimed he “didn’t know she was dead; he just thought she was English”.
...was this naughty? Nice? I report, you decide.
All together now:
♫ ♪ ♫ Oh Come All Ye Faithful ♪♫ ♪ ♫ ♪
As for tarts who do unspeakable things, we have this from the Dept. of Education:
...on the bright side, it was the wife and not the cop husband sending the wankpix to the boy.
From the Dept Of Tourism:
...oh, please. What an amateur.
And in the usual trash known as 
…♫ ♪ ♫ Oh Come All Ye Faithless ♪♫ ♪ ♫ ♪
And from her condo in 
:
…I dunno, I’d always be reminded that she was once “Property Of Dennis Rodman”. But anyway:
And that’s the news. Time to go Christmas shopping…
One Of Two
I have written before of my confusion between UK TV totties Kate Silverton and Natasha Kaplinsky, and I see that the latter has just “astounded” people by the fact that at her recent 52nd birthday, she seems not to have aged one bit. So below are some examples of Natasha taken over the years, and you can form your own opinion.
I do believe that under the dictionary heading of “yummy mummy” you’ll find her picture.
Bad Dads, BAD Dads
Apparently, CNN (who? I dunno, never heard of them either) seems to have a problem with Dads buying their kids guns for Christmas:
CNN began the article with a story of an Oregon dad, Paul Kemp, who bought a hunting rifle for his son, Nathan, when he turned 16 years old. Nathan had been hunting with his dad since he was 7 years old.
CNN then stated, “Parents looking to purchase a firearm for their child for the holidays have to balance their hopes for the gift with the risks that come with such a purchase, such as an accidental shooting, suicide or the gun being used in a crime.”
In an attempt to bolster their position, CNN said, “For example, the teenage school shooting suspects in Oxford, Michigan, and Winder, Georgia, allegedly used firearms they had received as Christmas gifts from their parents, and those parents have faced criminal charges.”
I don’t want to get into dueling statistics here, but I just wonder how many deaths have been caused by teenagers getting into road accidents with cars given them by their parents?
Never mind; giving guns to our kids for Christmas is a tradition that goes back generations, as these few ads prove:
Of course, as the Left hates the very concepts of both tradition and the family with a passion, these would be seen as pure evil.
Me, I just wish we could see more of them, updated for today’s market.
And I absolutely love this one:
…because as any fule kno, every man should have owned at least one Mauser in his lifetime.
If You Don’t Use It…
…of course you’re going to lose it. This post on Musk-X triggered a train of thought from me:
Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words – basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.
“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”
He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.
This concerns me, because it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation between the Son&Heir (a devout apostle of A.I.) and me (a very skeptical onlooker of said thing).
I have several problems with A.I., simply because I’m unsure of the value of its underlying assumption — its foundation, if you will — which believes that the accumulated knowledge on the Internet is solid: that even if there were some inaccuracies, they would be overcome by a preponderance of the correct theses. If that’s the case, then all well and good. But I am extremely leery of those “correct” theses: who decides what is truth, or nonsense, or (worst of all) highly plausible nonsense which only a dedicated expert (in the truest sense of the word) would have the knowledge, time and inclination to correct. The concept of A.I. seems to be a rather uncritical endorsement of “the wisdom of crowds” (i.e. received wisdom).
Well, pardon me if I don’t agree with that.
But returning to the argument at hand, Greg Isenberg uses the example of the calculator and its dolorous effect on mental arithmetic:
Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?
And here I agree, wholeheartedly. It’s bad enough to think that at some point, certain (and perhaps important) underpinnings of A.I. may turn out to be fallacious (whether unintended or malicious — another point to be considered) and large swathes of the A.I. inverted pyramids’ points may have been built, so to speak, on sand.
Ask yourself this: had A.I. existed before the reality of astrophysics had been learned, we would have believed, uncritically and unshakably, that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Well, we did. And we were absolutely and utterly wrong. After astrophysics came onto the scene, think how long it would take for all that A.I. to be overturned and corrected — as it actually took in the post-medieval era. Most people at that time couldn’t be bothered to think about astrophysics and just went on with their lives, untroubled.
What’s worse, though, is that at some point in the future the human intellect, having become flabby and lazy through its dependence on A.I., may not have the basic capacity to correct itself, to go back to first principles because quite frankly, those principles would have been lost and our capacity to recreate them likewise.
Like I said, I’m sure of only two things in this discussion: the first is the title of this post, and the second is my distrust of hearsay (my definition of A.I.).
I would be delighted to be disabused of my overall position, but I have to say it’s going to be a difficult job because I’m highly skeptical of this new wonder of science, especially as it makes our life so much easier and more convenient:
He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain.
It’s like losing the muscle capacity to walk, and worse still the instinctive knowledge of how to walk, simply because one has come to depend completely on an external machine to carry out that function of locomotion.
P.S. And I don’t even want to talk about this bullshit.