DEMOCRATS vs REPUBLICANS! Let’s Compare & Contrast | Christopher Titus (BEST OF ’23 …so far!)

The Secrets of Moms For Liberty

Hey! That Bug is Dancing … !

By my doges that love gravy, this is perfectly spot on. The only issue is that by Russia, the creator means both the USSR that was then ruled by Russia and what Putin is trying hard to recreate today.


Side note.  I am very sore and torn up.  The last few days I had a bug / light flu.  I have been sick to my stomach, very tired, diarrhea, and lots more pain.  But today I felt better, woke up a little before 2 AM, snuggled Ron for an hour, got up and started my day.  But I spent about 4.5 hours doing dishes while helping Ron understand / find stuff for my new office. Sadly by 5 PM I couldn’t stand upright and lost the ability to walk more than a few steps unsupported.  

After eating the wonderful supper Ron made of burgers with all the fixings including he made sautéed mushrooms and a cheese sauce, I am finishing this up and going to bed. Because I am struggling to walk, Ron fixed my food and delivered to me, and took everything away after.  He has been very attentive once he realized how much I pushed myself and how bad I was.  Ron has already said he will help me to the bedroom and getting into bed, but he has warned me I can not delay much longer, as he doesn’t want to hear me crying tonight in bed.   Night to all and hugs   

Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in “Southin’ Off.”

The battle for White votes in the South

Who is really the party of slavery?

That’s a complicated question to answer. In this episode, @TraeCrowderLiberalRedneck looks into why the history of slavery through the lens of party lines can be confusing and how the “Southern strategy” comes into play.

The American South is a complicated place, and we know a lot less about it than we think we do. And many things about the South that seem to make no sense are less confounding in context. The reality is the history of many Southern things has been manipulated, hidden, or just plain ignored. Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in “Southin’ Off.”

Southern Diversity

We all have a pretty skewed image of what “Southerner” means. @TraeCrowderLiberalRedneck takes a look at who the real Southerners are and how our views got so skewed. The American South is a complicated place, and we know a lot less about it than we think we do. And many things about the South that seem to make no sense are less confounding in context. The reality is the history of many Southern things has been manipulated, hidden, or just plain ignored. Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in “Southin’ Off.”

Subsidizing Suburbia …

Let’s be clear urban sprawl, cars, and the needed roads are destroying our country. Here in Florida we have to fight to get any mass transit and it is not planned in the county development plans at all. Every attempt at mass transit and fast trains is destroyed. Also let’s be honest it also was driven not just by profit for big oil and car manufacturers, but also by racism. When I was in Germany in the 1980s I was stunned how towns with housing, shops, everything a person would need including bars were closely clustered in to a small area with lots of land for growing crops or animal pastures around them. Plus I could go anywhere by mass transit, train, subway, or trolley. All fast and convenient. Most soldiers that were transferred in to the country never used their cars that they paid to have shipped. I came from a small cow town and we drove 30 minutes to the nearest big town. Here in Florida, about 30 minutes from where I live by highway is a completely new development based on the model in the video. It has shops, theaters, restaurants on ground floors, business offices above and lots of apartments, even doctor’s offices, and single family town houses, all confined into one place and walkable to everything. The only problem the residents have is all of us outsiders driving our cars in coming in to shop or go to medical appointments and they have very limited parking. If I could afford to live there I would. It simply works and is easy not just for the young but especially us older or disabled people. Give the video a watch please and thank Ten Bears for posting it. Hugs

Arkansas: Turn In All Black History Material For Review

Because we must make slavery look as beneficial as possible to the black slaves.  White people were doing these subhumans a favor by enslaving them and they gave them a chance to find the true god, have shelter, to have food, and work which every republican thinks black people should do more of.   Sickening, but she is a true believer in the white race and in the need to have her god in every aspect of everyone’s life, enforced by the Christian Taliban moral police gang thugs.  Hugs

An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/an-iowa-school-district-is-using-chatgpt-to-decide-which-books-to-ban/

But notice what book they don’t submit to the bot scan is the bible, which includes everything they programmed into it for getting rid of LGBTQIA inclusive material.

Official: “It is simply not feasible to read every book” for depictions of sex.

A book wrapped in chains.
Getty Images

In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.

The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials. Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.

To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.

The district detailed more of its methodology: “Lists of commonly challenged books were compiled from several sources to create a master list of books that should be reviewed. The books on this master list were filtered for challenges related to sexual content. Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity. We also will have teachers review classroom library collections.”

Unfit for this purpose

In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making. In this case, that bias is doubly convenient for administrators because they can pass responsibility for the decisions to the AI model. However, the machine is not equipped to make these kinds of decisions.

Large language models, such as those that power ChatGPT, are not oracles of infinite wisdom, and they make poor factual references. They are prone to confabulate information when it is not in their training data. Even when the data is present, their judgment should not serve as a substitute for a human—especially concerning matters of law, safety, or public health.

“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars. “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book. But OpenAI won’t tell us what ChatGPT has been trained on, so we have no way of knowing if it’s seen the contents of the book in question or not.”

It’s highly unlikely that ChatGPT’s training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book’s content—if the book is famous enough—but that’s not an accurate source of information either.

“We can guess at how it might be able to answer the question, based on the swathes of the Internet that ChatGPT has seen,” Willison said. “But that lack of transparency leaves us working in the dark. Could it be confused by Internet fan fiction relating to the characters in the book? How about misleading reviews written online by people with a grudge against the author?”

Indeed, ChatGPT has proven to be unsuitable for this task even through cursory tests by others. Upon questioning ChatGPT about the books on the potential ban list, Popular Science found uneven results and some that did not apparently match the bans put in place.

“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.

A post I was going to make that took a horrible side step.

Please forgive me, This is not how I wanted to start this post.  Earlier I had a great plan and took pictures, and was so happy I was kind of humming to my self.  Then as I sat down to do this post when on the other computer screen came a video I shouldn’t have watched, I should have shut down.  It was a news station report on two young boys fostered (me adopted) and the physical abuse they suffered.  They suffered no sexual abuse, but the descriptions of the physical abuse sent all my former great happy thoughts fleeing as I totally understood their thoughts they might die and their struggles with the pain inflicted on them, I started to cry and shake and then damn it the vortex came.  It howled and tried to consume me, I floundered looking for something some handle, anything in my mind to grab so it wouldn’t take me and I could with stand it.  Fight it off.  

I put music on the other computer, wiping off the abuse video, I have no idea the songs I can not think on them.  The screen says the best soft rock of the 70s,80s,90s.  But I am calming down, remembering what I wanted to post, the great idea I have.   I must stop sobbing, Ron must not come out and see me like this.  Such a great day, great week, and yet … 

By my dogs that love gravy I wonder how my heart, my body can take these sudden panics, the mental sounds of the vortex coming for me, my body’s desperate attempt to flee or just to curl up in a ball and let it happen.  My heart rate is again down to 76.  According to my Apple Watch that monitors it, my heart rate went to 158.  Anyway.   I am calm enough to do the post I wanted to do.  But damn, I need to be more careful on the news I see coming across the many web feeds.  But I did not select the video, I was watching a new channel on the fires in Hawaii.

I want to just add that I was one step from activating the emergency Scottie needs help signal.  That is to Randy.   For those that never followed my old blog I had a breakdown in 2014.  I started self harming again and was trapped in my head by the vortex, reliving my childhood abuse.  I won’t and sorry can not describe it, but Randy who was working long night shifts keep his phone on all the time, called me repeatedly if he did not hear from me, texted me, and took hours long phone calls from me desperately trying to stop the nightmares in my head from the memories.  He went without sleep so many days just to be there for me.  When I say Randy is the best brother ever, I mean it, and that is part of the reason why.  It is not an exaggeration to say that after drawing a sharp knife or razor blade across my skin drawing blood instead of doing it again I would reach out to Randy instead.  It got to where instead of the blades, I reached for him.  Anyway those days are past now.  For good I hope.  Yet it still gets scary sometimes.    

Ok Ron got up, kept asking me what was wrong, I denied anything was wrong and told him my allergies were acting up.  He seemed like he was going to pursue it but then dropped it, and I am glad.   I just don’t want to deal with all that now at this time.   I am trying hard to let the past sink back in to the deep depths of the deepest part of the ocean in a chest wrapped in many layers of big chains, weighted down by as many happier thoughts as I can push against it.  

Ok my head is clearing and I want to do the happy bread post I started to do.   Hugs to all who want them.   Scottie