X-RAY

 

Sometimes you don’t need X-ray vision to “see” right through things and know the truth. I once thought that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy was “intriguing,” but it was going nowhere for a reason. If he had just kept to being an environmental activist, maybe he’d still be “relevant,” but this article in Vanity Fair 2 demonstrated that his anti-vax and COVID-denying put him on the same level as the dangerous kooks enumerated in that story, who would have had the rest of us dying as they did if we shared their extremist conspiracy theories during the pandemic. 

Should we be surprised that RFK Jr., after suspending his pointless campaign, announced he was supporting Trump? The rest of the Kennedy clan has essentially disowned him over his support of far-right conspiracies, and this is his way of getting “even” with them. That’s the only way to see through his crackpot behavior.

He has also been passing himself off as a “working class populist,” which some say will “help” Trump because he has more “cred” being an offshoot of the liberal Kennedy clan. But that is ridiculous; like Trump he comes from privilege and just passes himself as a "populist" because he is taking advantage of “common” people who don’t like “government” getting in the way of whatever they hell they want to do. That’s the extent of his and Trump's “promises” to working people—we do what we want to do (that helps their own class), and if that hurts you while you are doing whatever you losers do, well don’t blame us because you voted for us:

 

Common sense can provide us with “X-ray vision" to see through the façade and into the truth. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp took advantage of one tragic murder in the state (which of course involved a white female) and signed an unnecessary law which merely parroted previous law in regard to local law enforcement reporting to the federal authorities about immigrants—both legal (thanks to the 1996 law) and illegal—in their custody, just more loudly as a PR stunt.

This is an example of how when making a political “statement,” it is always useful to portray "evidence" in isolation, rather than in context. Take for instance what is going on in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, where gender activists and media portray the killings and disappearances of females a "crisis" of “epidemic” proportions. Yes, the number as a rate of the population is certainly higher than in the U.S., but what about the “context”? 90 percent of all murder victims in the city (and in Mexico generally, thanks to the drug trade, no "thanks" to the US and its "habit") are male. 

What does this mean? It means that the percentage of  females of all murder victims in the U.S. is at least double that what it is in Ciudad Juárez, reportedly the “murder capital” of Mexico--and yet we are being led to believe the opposite is true because of the "quality," or lack thereof, of the "information" we are given, even by the "liberal" media.

The Georgia law also requires that a data base be established to count the number of crimes committed by immigrants (illegal especially), which probably will likely not have the effect desired to portray them as responsible for an alleged “crime epidemic” in the state, ignoring the fact that most of these immigrants are here to escape violence. Some people know what this is really about, to scapegoat them and deny them any rights as human beings as a political stunt:

 

 

But crime by “illegals” is just a way to draw people away from what Republican lawmakers are really up to, which is essentially make Georgia a police state and round up as many people as possible and into jail cells. In conjunction with the “new” anti-immigrant law, Kemp signed a bill that increases the number of crimes which require bail (18 out of 30 just misdemeanors), and makes it more difficult for lower-income people to pay it—thus, as critics point out, the law is simply an excuse to fill jail cells and enrich the bail bond industry.

Besides critics accusing “Republican lawmakers of unfairly demonizing Georgia’s Hispanic population that contributes to the state’s economy while raising families and paying taxes" according to the Georgia Recorder, the new laws have been accused by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia as creating  “a two-tiered justice system based on wealth. ‘SB 63 is cruel, costly, and counterproductive. Research shows that sweeping people into incarceration only increases crime and taxpayer costs, and yet Georgia locks up a higher percentage of its people than any other state in the country. SB 63 doubles down on that position, forcing even more people to languish in jail because they are poor or mentally ill.’”.

But is that all--especially this close to the November election? I wouldn't put it past these assholes that they "hope" that they can get enough voters who they presume will vote Democrat sitting in jail cells instead.

Meanwhile, in the place running neck-and-neck with Florida as the top experimentation in fascist statehood, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott continues to oversee the most vicious and corrupt state in the country. Besides being supported by the far-right and rogue courts with Trump-appointed judges to impose their own extremist and rights-hating culture war views, and undo separation of powers in the rogue state's favor,  Abbott continues to lie to people that he personally has “solved” the border with the usual false claims that most Americans wish to believe, that it is migrants escaping countries overrun with drug violence—and not U.S. citizens at legal border crossings—are bringing drugs, especially fentanyl, into the country.

Abbott also grandiosely  announced that 1 million “illegal” voters had been “purged” from the voter rolls. Of course this was just another publicity stunt, since  the “purged” were likely all legal voters at some point, and probably didn’t vote at all or at least not in recent years, their "purging" the usual result of registrars updating the voter rolls to account for deaths and people moving out of state. 

However, half the people “purged” were put on the “suspense list,” which means that they were not necessarily "illegal" voters, but that their addresses could not be immediately verified, even if they are legally able to vote in the state. But we can use our “X-ray vision” to see what is really “upsetting” Republicans in Texas: it is the fact that non-Hispanic whites are the minority in Texas, and they just don’t like the possibility that non-whites have a “right” to decide if they are allowed to run a fascist state or not.

You know, Texas is the state that decided it didn’t want to join the rest of the country in insuring its citizens had enough power during emergencies by being a part of the national grid, the failure of which resulted in "officially" 246 people dying in the deep freeze of 2021 that shutdown the state grid; most experts believe that is a “serious undercount,” and thanks to the oil industry that essentially tells Republican lawmakers how they want the state  run, little has been done to prevent people dying from the next “freeze.” 

Abbott (who when he was Texas AG filed 31 lawsuits against the Obama administration) like all Republicans uses the “border crisis” and "voter fraud" to distract voters' attentions away from Republican failure to address issues that actually effect their lives:

 

Meanwhile, Texas' current corrupt AG, Ken Paxton, who has vowed to investigate, according to the AG's website, "every credible report we receive" pertaining to criminal activity tied to elections, argued that citizens have the ability to register to vote when renewing or registering for a driver's license with the DPS, "so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices — calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups." Of course, Paxton didn't mention that some people might not have been told they could register to vote at the DPS offices, per his unofficial "instruction."

Texas' "show us your papers" law on the subject reminds one of Nazi Germany. In the BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning From History, a German historian pointed out that nearly all the information in Gestapo reports in a captured  repository were not from "investigations" by Gestapo agents but written statements by "ordinary citizens," and many of them were written anonymously and most presumably out of personal, vindictive motives.

Thus Texas law states that “a registered voter may challenge the registration of another voter of the same county”: The person challenging another voter’s registration must send a sworn statement to the county’s voter registrar stating they have “personal knowledge” of a specific reason that voter’s registration may not be valid. Typically, the stated reason for a voter registration challenge has to do with the voter’s address.  

Thus if some white person "suspects" for no other reason that a Hispanic neighbor is "illegal" save personal prejudice, he or she can report they are "illegal voters" this with no evidence at all. And if Paxton decided as a "registered voter" over the entire state decided on his own that he has "personal knowledge" that "voter fraud" has occurred, he can just take a stack of papers and declare everyone there to  be "invalid" just because he says so.

In a USA TODAY story on Paxton’s further corrupt abuse of power with the raid on Latino voter support groups, it is reported that "It is evident through his (Paxton's) patterns of lawsuits, raids, searches and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting," Roman Palomares, the national president of LULAC, said during the news conference. "LULAC will not stand idly by and allow our members to be to be targeted, harassed, bullied or intimidated." We can "speculate" that the reason for seizing all computers, cellphones and records during the raids was not to find "fraud," but to inhibit legitimate voting.

Paxton, who looks like a mob boss and has been voted back into office twice despite being a hypocrite who seems to believe he should not be held to the same “standards”  of adherence to lawful conduct that he falsely applies to others...

 

...accused Meta and wireless services in recent lawsuits (whatever he says, courts with Trump-appointed judges will support whatever he tells them to) of doing essentially what he did in his raids in the homes and offices of Hispanic voting rights activists. Paxton--who is so venal he was caught on video stealing another man's expensive pen at a courthouse metal detector station--himself has escaped being convicted after being impeached on bribery charges by Texas’s lower house, and “settled” a nearly decade-long felony case involving false statements and securities fraud with a fine and “community service”—where and when being under seal and he will no doubt never do. A criminal who should be sitting in the same jail cell with another person we know, commiserating about how "unfair" life is.

As Mother Jones noted in a 2022 piece, someone like Paxton would be a corrupt nobody who would likely be in prison but for one thing: he took advantage of the Trump “moment”:

Paxton’s persistence in the face of endless scandal makes him a model apparatchik for the current moment. He will never be president, but in a golden age of Republican corruption, in which anyone with ambition must bend the knee to an aspiring autocrat, a warm body with nothing to lose can do a lot of damage. By laundering the theories of conspiracists and hacks, he did as much as anyone short of Trump to make the Big Lie the new party orthodoxy. And in the process, he held a black light up to the rest of the conservative legal movement—the institutions and officials and donors who have turned jobs like his into some of the most powerful in state politics, and the compromises they’ve made to do it. There are a lot of Ken Paxtons out there, it turns out, and they were all just waiting to fall in line.

Are voters that stupid in Texas? Can't they see through this guy? Or do they just get their jollies watching cowardly bullies beating on helpless people? But wait--isn't he "working for the people" in the Meta lawsuit, or was this just a PR stunt to draw attention away from his own corruption? Are "the people" supposedly harmed by Meta getting any of that $1.4 billion “won” in the lawsuit, which was based on the usual Texas “Lone Star” posturing as “independent” of the rest of the country? According to the Texas Scorecard, “news” for “real Texans”—there is reason for doubt:

According to the Office of the Attorney General, money collected from the settlement will go, in small part, to pay outside counsel working on the case—lawyers specializing in these kinds of lawsuits. The vast majority, however, will go to the state general revenue fund. That means it will be up to the state legislature to decide how the money gets spent when they pass the next biennial budget, and if it will be given back to Texans. 

I wouldn’t doubt that Paxton will find a way of putting some of that money into his own pocket (probably as one of those "lawyers") before the people who he allegedly brought the lawsuit in the “name of” ever see a dime.

Of course there are things going on in Seattle that may not need X-ray vision to expose. Why did the city allow the building of that Convention Center extension? It isn’t close to downtown enough to “revitalize” it as “intended.” It looks more like a glorified parking garage inside...

 

 

...and its principle “function” was to be built on the only "available" land, the Convention Place transit station that serviced Metro bus traffic through the tunnel, which was built to get the buses off the streets in the first place, and is now being wasted on occasional light rail traffic.

Well, if we put on our X-ray vision goggles anyways, it is because the state paid the city $147 million for the land the transit station was built on, and the state was basically paying the cost of the $2 billion boondoggle. Where did that $147 million go? Probably to offset the budget deficit, instead of being used to build affordable housing, which critics at the time pointed out.

But not to worry if human intelligence fails: “Artificial Intelligence” is on the way, and of course it will be more “discerning” of the hard facts and come up with the “right answers” to all our problems, right? Uh-huh. Art Wittman of Brainyard tells us that what we call “AI” is not that all, but “machine learning,” which “has a hard time with context. If you’re trying to teach your ML system to write, you could show it lots of contemporary fiction and non-fiction books, newspapers and web articles, and it might start to do a pretty good job. Then throw it Chaucer and Shakespeare, and watch it fall apart. Give it some military manuals or scientific papers, and it’ll be hopelessly lost in the seas of jargon and arcane writing styles.”

He also notes that “Most of the bots you talk to on the phone or in web chats aren’t AI. They’re just taking your input, matching it to some known phrases and giving you canned replies. There’s no learning going on.” How many times have you said you wanted this and the bot either misinterpreted what you said or “admitted” it didn’t understand your “input”—especially when you used a curse word? For anything like AI to actually work, it needs lots and lots of unbiased and high-quality information—which tends not to be the kind of “information” that most social media chatbots receive and output.

Wittman notes that computers fed huge chunks of information merely have a large data base in which to process information by “example.” But is it “learning”?  A computer may develop its own algorithms without telling us what that is; it is just comparing and matching. There is no real “thought” that goes into it. “Most analytics today isn’t machine-learning-based. It’s just really complex programming that likely also uses probabilities and pattern matching of some sort, but the algorithm doesn’t self-improve, so again, there isn’t any learning going on. That doesn't mean it isn’t an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not artificial intelligence.”

According to a report from the Australian Data Science Education Institute:

A system that most of us would think of as real AI – something that can, more or less, think like us – is known in Computer Science as Generalised Artificial Intelligence, and it is nowhere on the horizon. The term Artificial Intelligence is used instead to apply to anything produced using techniques designed in the quest for real AI. It’s not intelligent. It just does some stuff that AI researchers came up with, and that might look a bit smart. In dim light. From the right angle. If you squint.

AI is usually misconstrued with “machine learning,” which is not the same kind of “learning” that humans do. ADSEI continues: 

They’re not really doing what we think of as learning, which should involve understanding. They’re just getting progressively better, with feedback, at one very specific task. The trouble with machine learning systems is that we don’t always know what they have learned. Sometimes they have not learned the things we intended them to…It’s a shame, really, that the term AI has morphed into referring to systems that are really quite horribly dumb. 

And even if we don’t have to worry about AI becoming sentient and taking over the world any time soon, there are plenty of dangers in the cavalier way we use AI and machine learning. We tend to trust them too easily, and fail to evaluate them critically.

Everything out there that calls itself “AI” isn’t really that at all; it is something that is no more “intelligent” than a simple Google search: you input search terms and given what is “out there," meaning it comes up with the “best” matches. Chatbots are not AI; all they do is regurgitate the most common “comments” found on the Internet on the topic at hand—even if most of what it “learns” from the input is some absurd conspiracy theory being bandied about by crackpots. It is also why Elon Musk’s own Grok AI (which at least does have a “disclaimer” warning people to use their own “judgment” about its outputs) is at the mercy of “woke” social attitudes, because “pro-woke” discussion predominates over the anti-woke, and that is what it bases its responses on. If you want to know what kind of asshole the Trump fundament-kissing Musk is, just "ask" his own Grok program.

Perhaps it may just come down to having “X-ray vision” into people’s motives, and if we are to trust people with "good" motives, or those who have "bad" motives. Is giving helpful information to people who have a right to vote a good motive, or a bad one to power-crazed politicians with authoritarian tendencies? Or is it really a "bad" motive to do what is “necessary” to stay in power, and with the help of extremist partisan judges with their own personal agendas, engage in blatantly racist suppression of voter rights? 

Shouldn't we see right through those who claim to have “good” motives when it seems obvious that their actions are clearly politically-motivated PR stunts based on deliberate misinformation  and conspiracies that have no basis in fact? “Learning”—human or machine—is unfortunately subject to its inputs, and unfortunately humans with bad motives are the source of bad inputs through either means.