Forced teaming ...

The Battle Of Little Big Horn, June 25th 1876 art print by American School.  

General  Custer and the men of the US 7th Cavalry are surrounded and massacred by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of Little Big Horn, Montana MPI/Getty Images

Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer in field uniform.

One must know one's limitations. - Dirty Harry

Throughout his life, Custer tested boundaries and rules. In his four years at West Point, he amassed a record total of 726 demerits, one of the worst conduct records in the history of the academy. The local minister remembered Custer as "the instigator of devilish plots both during the service and in Sunday school. On the surface he appeared attentive and respectful, but underneath the mind boiled with disruptive ideas."[18] A fellow cadet recalled Custer as declaring there were only two places in a class, the head and the foot, and since he had no desire to be the head, he aspired to be the foot. A roommate noted, "It was alright with George Custer, whether he knew his lesson or not; he simply did not allow it to trouble him."[19]

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

— Former US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld

Situational Awareness applies.

Forced teaming, you know, when someone, particularly a stranger with bad intentions, forces you to team up whether you like it or not is one of the prime warning signs to get away from said entity without hesitation. Seems Bibi and his lust to stay out of jail, no matter the cost, is doing just that vis a vis the US when it comes to a possible war with Hezbollah, a non-state military force possessing much greater fire power than Hamas. As often stated before, the parallels to Custer and the Little Big Horn are too great to ignore save that Israel wants to drag the US into the fray to make sure they remain the hegemon of the Middle East in spite of the fact things are far different now as the threat to Israel is now existential no matter what Israel's insane far right government states to the contrary. 

For the occupation state, this potential conflict is a “war of choice” driven by historical and ethnonationalist motivations. But it is also premised on past Israeli military advantages that are long gone in today’s missile-laden West Asia.

The Six-Day War of 1967 fostered a belief in the invincibility of the Israeli military, the superiority of Zionism, and the manifest destiny of its ‘chosen people.’ It was with similar hubris that Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941. Fast forward eight decades, and today, Israelis are informing US officials “that it can pull off a ‘blitzkrieg’” in Lebanon.

In 1967, the psychological impact on neighboring Arab states was profound due to the decisive defeat of their armies. This sentiment persisted until 2006, when Lebanon’s Hezbollah emerged politically victorious, shattering the perception of Israeli invulnerability and altering regional power dynamics.

Further shaping Israeli delusions of military superiority is the ethnonationalist rhetoric prevalent in Tel Aviv’s policy decision-making circles, embodied by extremist ministers like Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have revived the ideologies of the once-banned Meir Kahane. While a few sober military voices in Israel advocate for a diplomatic solution to the northern border crisis, hubris and ethnonationalism currently dominate the discourse.

Custer's lives on does he not?

Lest we forget, The Charge of the Light Brigade comes to mind here, right?

William Simpson (painter, 1823-1899) E. Walker (lithographer, unknown) Published by Goupil & Cie, Paris, and Day & Son, London. - The Library of Congress

The Charge of the Light Brigade

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

   Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

   All the world wondered.

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right through the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre stroke

   Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

   Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

   Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

   All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

   Noble six hundred!

Off the rails yet again ...

 

A coal-fired power plant in Robertson County, Texas. One court ruling this week said the E.P.A. could not limit smokestack pollution that drifts across state lines.Credit...Brandon Bell/Getty Images

As much as I detested Tricky Dick, I actually feel sad as he created the E.P.A. back in 1970. 

To whit.

In early 1970, as a result of heightened public concerns about deteriorating city air, natural areas littered with debris, and urban water supplies contaminated with dangerous impurities, President Richard Nixon presented the House and Senate a groundbreaking 37-point message on the environment.  These points included:

• requesting four billion dollars for the improvement of water treatment facilities;
• asking for national air quality standards and stringent guidelines to lower motor vehicle emissions;
• launching federally-funded research to reduce automobile pollution;
• ordering a clean-up of federal facilities that had fouled air and water;
• seeking legislation to end the dumping of wastes into the Great Lakes;
• proposing a tax on lead additives in gasoline;
• forwarding to Congress a plan to tighten safeguards on the seaborne transportation of oil; and
• approving a National Contingency Plan for the treatment of oil spills.

The E.P.A.'s been a resounding success but now, thanks to the esteemed SC, the E.P.A.'s power impacts corporate profits too much so something has to be done, right?

A spate of decisions over the past two years by the Supreme Court has significantly impaired the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit pollution in the air and water, regulate the use of toxic chemicals and reduce the greenhouse gasses that are heating the planet.

This term, the court’s conservative supermajority handed down several rulings that chip away at the power of many federal agencies.

But the environmental agency has been under particular fire, the result of a series of cases brought since 2022 by conservative activists who say that E.P.A. regulations have driven up costs for industries ranging from electric utilities to home building. Those arguments have resonated among justices skeptical of government regulation.

On Friday, the court ended the use of what is known as the Chevron doctrine, a cornerstone of administrative law for 40 years that said that courts should defer to government agencies to interpret unclear laws. That decision threatens the authority of many federal agencies to regulate the environment and also health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more.

But more remarkable have been several decisions by the court to intervene to stop environmental regulations before they were decided by lower courts or even before they were implemented by the executive branch.

On Thursday, the court said the E.P.A. could not limit smokestack pollution that blows across state borders under a measure known as the “good neighbor rule.” In that case, the court took the surprising step of weighing in while litigation was still pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In the end, its all about the money, right?

With luck, we might get a king ...

 

“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her impassioned dissent in Trump v. United States.
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

With luck, we might get a king or better yet, a dictator as the president, regarding official acts conducted by same, means said entity is above the law. something most disconcerting without question. 

The Supreme Court’s decision to bestow presidents with immunity from prosecution over official actions is an extraordinary expansion of executive power that will reverberate long after Donald J. Trump is gone.

Beyond its immediate implications for the election subversion case against Mr. Trump and the prospect that he may feel less constrained by law if he returns to power, the ruling also adds to the nearly relentless rise of presidential power since the mid-20th century.

It had seemed like a constitutional truism in recent years when more than one lower-court opinion addressing novel legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking behavior observed that presidents are not kings. But suddenly, they do enjoy a kind of monarchical prerogative.

“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an outraged dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

Ricardo Tomás

It gets better ... as this court sees itself as something other than a participant in our democratic system. It sees itself as the enforcer of the separation of powers, but not itself subject to that separation.

As a searing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes clear, some of the more extreme hypotheticals from the oral arguments in this case are no longer purely hypothetical. She writes that this newly fashioned presidential immunity “lies about like a loaded weapon” (quoting from a dissent in an earlier decision, Korematsu v. United States) for any president who “wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival or his own financial gain above the interests of the nation.” A president “orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

It is one thing for an aspiring president to promise lawlessness. The only way to deliver on that promise is with a willing and cooperative court. It appears that Mr. Trump has one.

As often said by yours truly, this is the worst SC in history.

Addendum: The Watergate hearings investigating the break-in would be moot as all the activities Nixon did including taping all conversations were, in effect, official acts conducted by the president.

The British March Through Redding

History comes alive in Redding with reenactors recreating how the British marched through Redding during the revolutionary war. Educational, detailed and above all else, fun, as spectators, young and old alike, enjoyed watching how members of the Brigade of the American Revolution brought to life the 1777 march the British did on a mission to dismantle the Continental Army Supply Depot in Danbury.

Addendum: The raid on Danbury was a pyrrhic victory for the British as the Continental Army found their footing as a viable military force to be reckoned with, much to the surprise of the British who considered the patriots to be ragamuffins, not able to deal with the military prowess of the British Empire
in any way, shape or fashion. 

We are in deep shit but there are options ...

 

A raspy-voiced President Biden struggled to deliver his lines and counter former President Donald J. Trump during the debate on Thursday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

We are in deep shit ... Agent Orange, serial liar but in good form as one possessing malignant charisma, successfully beat down Sleepy Joe, a man dealing not well with the ravages of old age, in a presidential debate for the ages. As an old geezer myself but not showing signs of dementia as of late, felt real sorrow because anyone possessing in depth knowledge of how governance works, would have made short work of Trump without question. 

As often I said to friends, Paddy Chayefsky would have been deemed crazy in predicting a scenario as absurd and insane as this but here we are as we move toward an election of truly terrifying implications if Trump wins, a notion voiced by this rube for well over a year and a half as the Orange Cheeto is Gladstone Gander, a guy blessed with not only a teflon suit able to ward off truly dreadful events that would send yours truly to jail for years but also is blessed with incredible luck in in beating Hillary in 2016 against all odds and now competing with a compromised Joe Biden in 2024.

Gladstone Gander

Question? What should the dems do? For starters, dump Biden and pick California Governor Gavin Newsom to go after Trump with a younger guy able to deal with an obnoxious old bully with no redeeming qualities AFAIK. 

President Biden hoped to build fresh momentum for his re-election bid by agreeing to debate nearly two months before he is to be formally nominated. Instead, his halting and disjointed performance on Thursday night prompted a wave of panic among Democrats and reopened discussion of whether he should be the nominee at all.

Over the course of 90 minutes, a raspy-voiced Mr. Biden struggled to deliver his lines and counter a sharp though deeply dishonest former President Donald J. Trump, raising doubts about the incumbent president’s ability to wage a vigorous and competitive campaign four months before the election. Rather than dispel concerns about his age, Mr. Biden, 81, made it the central issue.

All eyes are on Gavin Newsom for a reason. Several, actually.

Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg

Time to make the move now ...

When cameras captured California Governor Gavin Newsom walking into CNN’s spin room on Thursday evening, flashing his Hollywood smile before the presidential debate in Atlanta, a few political observers in his home state rushed to social media with some version of the same annoyed question.

“Why is he there?”

Newsom was there to cheer on President Joe Biden before his debate with former President Donald Trump. “Biden is confident,” Newsom told reporters. “He’s got a record and he’s got a vision for the future.”

A couple of painful hours later, after a debate in which Biden, his voice raspy and halting, looked every bit of his 81 years, that vision for the future seemed cloudy. Biden’s pale and frail appearance led to immediate and widespread speculation that he would be pushed to decline the Democratic nomination. And that kind of talk, in turn, leads quickly to Newsom.

Of the many prominent Democrats with aspirations for higher office, Newsom is arguably best equipped -- in fundraising chops, in messaging and in campaign infrastructure -- to step up in an emergency. And this is, by all indications, an emergency.

For VP, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan works for me.

Gretchen Whitmer

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

The Iron Dome

Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system (left) intercepts rockets (right) fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza on May 14, 2021. Over the years, Iron Dome has stopped thousands of rockets headed for Israeli cities, but experts warn that in a war with Hezbollah, new tactics and sheer numbers could cause it to fail. Anas Baba/AFP via Getty Images

Bibi, the inept "leader" of Israel, is leading his country into Little Big Horn territory with his disastrous genocidal treatment of Gaza and his total ignorance of how tech is changing the modern battlefield 24/7 with cheap drones able to overwhelm any defense system if enough of them are unleashed, something readily understood by anyone versed with how warfare is now being conducted in the year of our lord 2024. With this being said, Israel now has an existential crisis on its hands due to the far right government running things with arrogant and abject incompetence with no acknowledgement the Middle East is different now as seen by not only the rise of Hezbollah as a viable military force but also with the resilience of Hamas against the savage assault of Gaza begun by the Israelis after the surprise October 7th attack conducted by Hamas.

There are no winners here. A two state solution is the only way if both entities want to survive.

"The enemy knows very well that no place will be safe from our missiles and drones," Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said on June 19.

Keeping those weapons from hitting Israeli territory is the job of a sophisticated air defense system called Iron Dome. It has intercepted thousands of missiles over the years, and it has been critical to protecting Israel's cities during the latest war in Gaza.

But some experts warn that Hezbollah's arsenal could push the system past its limits.

The Iranian-backed group has been conducting increasingly brazen attacks using exploding drones and low-flying missiles that Iron Dome has struggled to intercept. And last week, Hezbollah published a 10-minute-long surveillance video from an unmanned aerial vehicle that had slipped past multiple Iron Dome launchers. Among the sensitive locations it filmed was a secure manufacturing facility belonging to the Israeli defense firm Rafael — the company that makes the missile defense system.

The implication was clear: Hezbollah has Iron Dome in its sights. And this could be just a small taste of what's to come, says Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Unlike the Palestinian group Hamas, Hezbollah is believed to have a large arsenal of precision-guided weapons that it could fire in a war with Israel.

"Look, there's not enough Iron Domes in the world to contend with the reported 100,000 or so rockets that Hezbollah may have," he warns.

Iron Dome is a network of high-powered radar, a targeting computer and missile launchers spread across Israel. It prioritizes incoming rockets, and it attempts to shoot them down only when they're headed for populated areas. Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images

Iron Dome's an excellent system but ...

But Kalisky has been watching as the system has struggled to deal with Hezbollah's tactics. The group has been using anti-tank missiles, which fly low to the ground. The missiles, which can be fired only over short ranges, are too fast for Iron Dome to intercept, and they fly below the minimum altitude of the interceptor missiles.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also pose a problem for Iron Dome's radar, Kalisky says: The UAVs are made of carbon-based materials like wood and plastic that don't reflect radar as well as metal rockets do. "It's very difficult to detect them." Moreover, the border with Lebanon is home to a lot of birds that can be mistaken by the radar system for UAVs. "You have many, many false alarms," he says.

"To be honest, I think that Hezbollah recognized our gaps," says Zvika Haimovich, a retired brigadier general who oversaw Israel's air defenses from 2015 to 2018. "For that reason, they are using more and more UAVs in the last few weeks."

Tech never sleeps ...

The Reality Distortion Field :)

Cognitive dissidence, reality distortion field, lack of knowledge of all things scientific or tech, take your pick as it's just the beginning as man moves further into the 21st century. :)

3/26/24 - 3/27/24 Finding Redding's ancestors

Using ground penetrating radar, (GPR) finding long lost Redding ancestors residing in a small cemetery becomes an enjoyable learning experience for young and old alike.
Check it out, it's a fun and educational thing to do. :)

Fractals+ :)

A shallow inland sea

Vue is now free! Said software has been on my radar screen for years. Now available for all to enjoy, the desire to create tiny bits of nature with some degree of competency with this extraordinary software is finally at hand. Enjoy. :)

Water World ...

Inflection Point

Who do you trust?

Image by Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Apart from sleaziness, greed, lying and bullying, Sam Altman's an excellent CEO, right? Add to this is the fact Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works, a notion yours truly has been talking about for quite some time thanks to the rise of neural nets, the program driven analog construct needed to enable AI to react to the world in real time, something human coders cannot do in any way, shape or fashion.

Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works

OpenAI has raised tens of billions of dollars to develop AI technologies that are changing the world.

But there's one glaring problem: it's still struggling to understand how its tech actually works.

During last week's International Telecommunication Union AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was stumped after being asked how his company's large language models (LLM) really function under the hood.

"We certainly have not solved interpretability," he said, as quoted by the Observer, essentially saying the company has yet to figure out how to trace back their AI models' often bizarre and inaccurate output and the decisions it made to come to those answers.

When pushed during the event by The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, who asked if that shouldn't be an "argument to not keep releasing new, more powerful models," Altman was seemingly baffled, countering with a half-hearted reassurance that the AIs are "generally considered safe and robust."

As for being a legit CEO, well, that's open for discussion is it not?

More than six months after Sam Altman was fired, then rehired, one of OpenAI’s former board members is finally spilling the tea on what happened behind closed doors. Helen Toner, one of four people responsible for firing OpenAI’s CEO, says Altman’s incessant lying created a toxic culture that executives described as “psychological abuse.”

In her first long-form interview since Sam Altman’s firing, Toner tells The Ted AI Show that executives came to OpenAI’s board in October 2023 with serious allegations against the company’s CEO. According to Toner, two executives said they couldn’t trust Altman and showed the board screenshots of Altman’s manipulation and lying. These executives reportedly said they had no belief that Altman could or would change, and their testimonies pushed the Board to fire the CEO weeks later. This interview, released on Tuesday, comes after weeks of public backlash against OpenAI where the company’s truthfulness has been called into question by Scarlett Johansson and former employees.

Let's think about this. Apart from greed and duplicity on the part of Altman is the fact he hasn't a clue about how Open AI's code works, the dark secret every major developer of AI shares due to the fact of program driven hidden layers residing in neural nets enabling AI, as stated before, to react to the real world in realtime. 

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers" of AI, is adamant that AI will surpass human intelligence — and worries that we aren't being safe enough about its development.

This isn't just his opinion, though it certainly carries weight on its own. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, Hinton claimed that the idea of AI surpassing human intelligence as an inevitability is in fact the consensus of leaders in the field.

"Very few of the experts are in doubt about that," Hinton told the BBC. "Almost everybody I know who is an expert on AI believes that they will exceed human intelligence — it's just a question of when."

Hate to say it but yours truly has been talking about ASI for years, something somewhat comforting when people like Hinton, who will forget more than what this rube will ever know about AI, agrees with me regarding this most discomforting reality while our civilization moves further into the 21st century.