Thank you ❤️

I went on a road trip through the mountains in central Colorado during the summer ~7ish years ago. I still don’t know what the smell actually was but every once in a while we would drive through certain parts of the mountains that had slightly sweet and clean/crisp smelling air. Never forgotten it.

The closest I can think to describe it would be something floral like freesia+ a woodsy Sequoia/evergreen combination.

⬅️Head like a hole

This guy has strategically changed the law in Louisiana, starting over a decade ago when he was AG. Republicans in the Louisiana House and Senate introduce and pass laws at his behest that have allowed him pretty much unchecked power.

One of the first things he did when he took office was fire a tenured law professor bc he made fun of him in one of his law classes.

Once he was accused of an ethics violation, so he just completely changed the laws about who sat on the state ethics board and term limits, and then restaffed the board so it was composed of his own friends. Surprisingly the board looked into it and determined there was no ethics violation.

What’s amazing to me is how fast they blocked the elections because the maps were found “illegal”.

Almost like it was timed pretty perfectly.

Landry has strategically set himself up to have way too much power, and basically destroyed any checks and balances within the state of Louisiana.

On the one hand, it is a blatantly antidemocratic move to do something like this so close to the election, especially with early voting starting . On the other, nobody (with the exception of the federal government, and let’s face it, we know what side they’re on with Trump in the White House) can stop the kingfish from doing what he wants to do in his own pond.

Doing this so close to the election means that the burden of the ticking clock is actually placed on anybody figuring out how to challenge him. And even if they somehow do successfully figure out how to stop him from cancelling the elections the day of (May 16th), undoubtedly he will have already done some significant damage either by interfering with early voting or just spreading misinformation.

This is just the most egregious thing he’s done so far to blatantly interfere with elections and democracy. Louisiana just removed an existing elected position within New Orleans at Landry’s behest, after the candidate was sworn in to office. Before doing that it was a statewide voter purge from the ballots, and willingly agreeing to hand over voter registration data to the DOJ.

Landry has a real knack for making the most unbelievable anti-democratic bullshit happen overnight. People always talk about how incredibly dumb he is in person, but look at the very scary bullshit he has accomplished. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean that he either wants to be underestimated (like Stalin), or he has somebody with a lot of strategic capability so far up his ass, you can’t even see them basically wearing him like an Edgar suit.

The strategy that has gone into all of this should be very unnerving. Over and over again, we see Landry test something out in Louisiana only to then watch the Trump administration unleash the exact same strategy at a federal level. A lot of this has been shit Landry started to set up almost a decade ago when he was still AG, and it’s fallen into place like a row of dominos.

I have very little hope of actually stopping Landry from cancelling Louisiana elections. I hope I’m wrong, but regardless, America should be watching this very closely to preempt the strategy Trump will be using to completely cancel the midterms.

Omg is Charlie AI or did AI become Charlie?

Hope so. If humanity makes it I guess.

Or the corporations running the government are intentionally hoping to cause the collapse of the United States and completely privatize every aspect of whatever they replace it with.

Broligarchs determining U.S. domestic policy: There’s no question China has an advantage in AI development. That’s why we had to cut funding to every other area (including science), strip away privacy laws, destroy civil liberties, gut regulations for corporations, and put all of our eggs into one AI basket.

Trump: Done.

NSB: China has a growing advantage over the U.S. in science. Perhaps we should rethink dumping money into the AI hole in the ground you have been banking on turning into the next .com boom? Maybe we could consider moving it back into science.

Trump: Yuh fiyad…

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…😬

I am not totally opposed to AI. I think it has its uses.

However, AI generated art and especially music is not my thing. I kinda see how even that can have its uses but in general, there’s just something so hollow and ick about it when it’s meant to be the primary form of communication.

For example, if somebody used AI generated art on a slide in a presentation they were giving to help with audience communication, I would consider that like using clipart. Nobody’s going to judge you too hard for not creating your own art on every slide, but nobody’s going to be overly impressed with you using it either. It serves its purpose and nobody really thinks twice about it.

When corporations (who could easily afford to hire artists to generate much better art) use it to cut corners, maximize profit and sell a product, that deserves pretty harsh judgement imo and usually signals that’s a product/business I want to avoid.

When people use AI to make music as a joke, I don’t really care. When people use AI to make music and pretend they’re creating art it kind of makes me sick.

Listening to it feels so hollow and emotionless and I know people who rely on AI to generate that music for them, usually think it sounds great. To me it always gives me the same vibes as listening to that version of All I want for Christmas where it’s Maria Carey’s vocals played back through a midi.

It’s funny and it serves a purpose for that reason, but it’s truly uncomfortable to listen to it, and I definitely would never willingly listen to it in an attempt to enjoy music.

And tbh it’s pretty scary to watch people who develop a dependence on AI really have their creativity and talent sucked away so quickly. Hoping my own experience seeing it happen isn’t generalizable to the rest of humanity but it’s been like watching somebody become a pod person and a shadow of who they used to be.

I think it really comes down to asking yourself why do you enjoy music or art? Either creating it or listening/viewing something created by somebody else. Why does it exist in the first place?

Is it to serve a purpose and communicate messages for things like factual information and products? Or is it supposed to make you feel something?

I guess that’s a big part of it for me. I associate the uncomfortable feeling I get from AI music and art with an emptiness. Like if I was really sad, and I tried to listen to music I enjoy but found myself feeling the way I do when I listen to AI, I would worry I’m developing clinical depression.

Like AI generated art and music has figured out how to capture the feeling of a neurochemical imbalance in a bottle, and tried to gift it to the world.

I remember being ~17 and talking to a friend of mine about how we both agreed neither one of us would probably reach 25. Luckily we were wrong, but a lot of the people we grew up with unfortunately did end up dying really young.

The only other part Incan remember was her bringing up this one friend of ours in particular she also thought would die young, but only because he was too ridiculous for her to picture as an old man. He was still alive the last time I checked, but I remember her saying she predicted it would be some bizarre way that would end up in the news like ‘man bites carrot, carrot bites back.’

I don’t think all Democrats have been purchased by conservatives to prevent any progress from happening, but obviously some have. Because you don’t need all of them, you only need just enough to give the right wing fascist shit like this one or two extra Dems to get it to pass.

The blue dog caucus or whatever it’s called is fucking packed with dems who seem to exist only to fuck over the democratic party

Does it help you not to think or not to feel?

Or does it allow you not to think about how something makes you feel? Or not think about why you don’t feel anything even when you should?

It’s easy to confuse emotional numbing with “not thinking,” but usually, when people intentionally immerse themselves completely in a task to avoid their thoughts, it’s because the thoughts make them feel uncomfortable. Usually that uncomfortable feeling is your body’s way of signaling something is important, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by just avoiding it. That doesn’t mean you should act on it, but stuffing it down doesn’t make it go away forever. Eventually it’s going to pop up again, probably at a very inconvenient time.

If you’re intentionally distracting yourself in order to not let yourself think, you risk doing something dumb. If you’re not letting yourself feel, you risk acting like a sociopath.

The lady doth protest too much. Because he’s hoping to distract from the fact that he’s a pedophile.

“This is the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation,”

On May 5, the National Science Board is scheduled to meet. There is no agenda, and at the moment, no board. That absence is the thing worth attending to, beyond the news of any particular firing. The question is not who sits on the board. The question is whether the kind of board the 1950 Act envisioned still exists in practice, and what American science looks like if it does not.

…

I always heard them called granddaddy long legs growing up