The best SC election result in a while

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Screenshot — click to see source.

Last night, I started to text Alan Wilson my congratulations. I was going to say:

Alan, I’m very happy for you tonight, and very relieved for South Carolina.

But when his number came up, I realized it was a landline, probably at the AG’s office. I guess I don’t have his mobile. So I’ll just say it here.

I’m happy for Alan not only because he’s a good guy, but because he was the only remotely decent, qualified, sane candidate seeking the GOP nomination. He was a guy who was running because he thinks S.C. needs a good governor (near as I can tell, that idea was nowhere in the minds of his opponents), and that he could do the job.

And I think he’s right. Let’s hope so, because he’s now the guy who will be elected governor in November. That is, officially elected governor, in the de jure sense. The de facto election was yesterday.

Is that a crack at Jermaine Johnson? Absolutely not. I don’t know him, and know little about him (factors that most voters in South Carolina share), but I know a lot of people who do know him and say only good things about him. He seems to have clearly been a stronger candidate than the other two who ran. But among those people who say good things about him and are thoroughly versed in the realities of South Carolina politics, I don’t think a single one thinks the Democrats are going to win this time.

Just to review: No Democrat has been elected governor in this state in this century. The last was Jim Hodges in 1998, and he had to sell out completely on the state lottery (he was a staunch and articulate opponent of the idea before that) in order to win. Before that, the last had been Dick Riley, who was first elected in the ’70s and was already out of office when I arrived at The State in 1987.

Since then, the Democrats have had two strong candidates — Vincent Sheheen and James Smith, whom I helped make a run at the office in 2018. Vincent made a very good showing in the 2010 race — a tough one because that was the year of the Tea Party and the beginning of the state GOP’s slide into very disturbing territory. But he didn’t do as well.

There was no one as strong as those two seeking the Democratic nomination this year.

So for me as a voter, the issue was as always: How do we get the best — or least bad — result out of this election? Given that the Republican was almost completely certain to win, that meant Alan Wilson had to win. Because the rest of the field was… disturbing, to use that relatively neutral word again.

Never mind the bullets South Carolina dodged on June 9. In yesterday’s runoff, Alan was up against a woman who had offered zero reasons why any voter who cares about good governance would vote for her to become our state’s chief executive. Go look at her website if you doubt me.

And yet, she had received more votes than Alan Wilson had on June 9. That was worrisome, since to beat her, Alan had to get the votes that had gone to the other candidates who didn’t make the runoff cut. Arguments can be made that those people were worse options than Pam Evette. And Wilson would need the support of people who actually voted for those people.

And he got them, I’m happy to say. In fact, he crushed Pam Evette, by a proportion you would have expected back in the days before the American and South Carolina electorates went mad about a decade ago. He got 69 percent of the vote, at last count.

That’s what makes this the best election result in SC since… well, since Russell Ott beat first Dick Harpootlian, and then the Republican to become my new senator in 2024. In this election, people who had just voted for some of the worst candidates possible somehow managed to see by yesterday that Alan was clearly the better choice. Which he was, for all sorts of reasons that used to matter in elections, but seldom do these days — things like experience, understanding of the job, character, temperament, and ability to see beyond the pettiest concerns of your own partisan base.

Cindi pointed out some of those things in her paper’s runoff endorsement of Alan. I was reminded of such point again this morning. I had coffee with James Smith to talk about something totally unrelated to this stuff, but of course the runoff came up. James told me about something I had totally missed.

Did you watch the GOP gubernatorial debates? I tried to watch one for about two minutes, but stopped so I wouldn’t hurl. James tells me that Pam Evette tried to make an issue of him. She blathered on about Alan having supported a “liberal judge” candidate — that candidate being James. That’s the level on which she operates — Trumpian labels, rather than facts or other relevant considerations.

I hadn’t remembered Alan supporting him, but James did not dispute that fact, and if it’s correct, that would make sense.

Let me tell you an anecdote from the 2018 election. One day, Alan was presiding over a ceremony on the south lawn of the State House that was honoring — I think (it’s been awhile) — public officeholders who have served in the National Guard (or in the military generally — as I said, it’s been awhile).

Alan and James are officers in the Guard. Alan is a JAG officer, and James was a JAG officer who, after 9/11, resigned his commission to enlist as an infantry soldier. He eventually regained his commission in that capacity, and led troops in combat in Afghanistan. That gained him a place on the Guard’s Wall of Fame. He’s now a lieutenant colonel. If there are any officers in the Guard who don’t deeply respect his service, I haven’t met them.

I was standing on the edges of that gathering, waiting for James to come down from his office in the Blatt Building (where I think he was making calls to potential donors or something else dreary but necessary). As I waited, Alan came up to me to ask whether James was going to make it. He was very anxious to make sure James would be there to be recognized and honored. He was very clear and insistent on that point, and his tone and facial expression strongly emphasized his words.

Or to put it another way, the Republican attorney general was very worried he wouldn’t get a chance to honor the Democratic nominee for governor, in the middle of the general election. That’s the way Pam Evette would have put it, and she would have expected voters to be totally outraged at such a display of honor and decency.

So I went up and told James “We have to go NOW,” and he came along, and as I recall, Alan was quite relieved.

To the Pam Evettes of this world, that story would damn him. So I’m quite relieved that she won’t be our governor beginning next year.

 

Did anyone else out there vote today? How did it go?

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I expect the answer from most of you will be “no.”

But I did. This is the kind of situation in which careful, thoughtful voters have the greatest obligation to vote. Primaries are bad enough — for the most part, the only people who turn out (for both parties) are the most devoted party members, and therefore, far too often, the most dangerous ideologues.

But runoffs are worse. Fortunately, some of the most dangerous characters (Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace) were eliminated on June 9. And happily, we won’t have either of them in Congress any more after this year, either.

The runoff is still critical, as it’s between the best of the lot from the original crowd, and someone who had no business running for the office she had already held since 2018, much less for governor. (Things could have been very different, as I have explained before — but voters threw away that opportunity.)

By contrast, Alan Wilson is an intelligent, decent person who has an unusual amount of experience in government at the statewide level. Does he say some ridiculous stuff in the course of a GOP primary? Yep. Because you have to do that to win a Republican primary (which is the only way to get elected governor, unless you’re a Democratic governor of greater popularity than we’ve seen in a generation; if James couldn’t do it, no Democrat on the scene today can).

If you wonder how Alan differs from his opponents (including the only surviving one) in this contest, look at that editorial I called your attention to yesterday. The older I get, the less and less it’s about the “issues” pols yammer about, and more and more about character.

That’s why I voted for him two weeks ago, and again today. And fervently hope he wins, because the one who wins today will be our governor starting next year.

The problem is, how many people like me — people who despise parties and do all they can to elect the best (or at least, least bad) candidate — voted today?

Not as many as should have, I’m sure. But will the ones who did be enough?

Hail the new Editorial Page Editor!

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Maybe that’s not the best way to wish Cindi Scoppe well as she takes the helm of the Post and Courier‘s editorial pages, but it sounds right to me. No one ever greeted me that way when I was an EPE, but of course they should have.

Anyway, she deserves it. The best possible person is now heading the only functioning editorial board in the state of South Carolina, and that’s good for the paper, and good for all of us.

Here are her thoughts on her new job. An excerpt:

Now, back to the main topic: The values that are most important to me and us involve how we live together in society and how we find solutions to the problems that most of us face regardless of our politics.

That starts with focusing on improving our communities and state rather than winning prizes or appealing to people who already agree with us. We’re happy to win prizes, but the real prize is guiding conversations and decisions in a positive direction.

It means focusing on what’s best for our communities rather than us personally. A small example: I hate the law that says you can’t touch your phone while you’re driving, but I wrote editorials advocating for it (and yes, I obey it), because it would save lives with only minor inconvenience.

We aim to be pragmatic and strategic in what we write about and what we don’t. We’re not worried about offending readers or lawmakers, but we’re not going to do that absent a good reason; we pick our battles….

We believe there’s rarely a single right approach to any problem, and we support consensus and compromise rather than an all-or-nothing answer. We’re not going to reject solutions that match our values perfectly, but we’ll rarely condemn a solution that gives us only part of what we want.

In other words, Cindi is continuing the mission. She could have written the same words to describe our approach back in the day at The State. The place where we used to do that is now rubble. So it’s great that the Post and Courier still provides her with a platform from which she can carry on.

Congratulations to Cindi, and especially to the Post and Courier for being smart enough to see she’s the one for the job.

This is going to be good…

My answer to Barry

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Hi, I’m your tour guide. I’m standing at the Navy Yahd in Charlestown. That’s downtown Boston across the hahbuh. That steeple in the middle is Old North Church. I think. I’m not claiming to be a wicked smaht tour guide…

I don’t have time for a regular post, but I thought I’d use the blog as a workaround for an email problem.

Our regular Barry wrote to me to say he and his wife were going to Boston soon, and asking for suggestions regarding “must do” things.

Since I had a great time in Boston several years back, I wrote a lengthy response — and the email kept failing to send. So I’ll just post it here, on the off chance that he checks the blog, even though it’s been awhile since I’ve posted or even looked at comments (the spam comments just keep piling up, waiting for a day when I can spend a couple of hours on the phone with GoDaddy again, and see if I can shut it off…).

Anyway, here’s my response:

Barry,
That’s great! I hope you have a fun trip.
We didn’t stay in a hotel. We stayed in a B&B out in Newton (the town Fig Newtons are named for), which is basically just part of the sprawling megacity of Boston. We loved it there, especially since it was a block from the “T,” which is Boston’s subway/mass transit system. And you know how I love public transportation. From there, it was just a straight shot to the East into downtown, on the Green Line.
I don’t know if you could find a vacancy in that place on this short notice. Better stick with your hotel reservation.
Your best bet, in terms of history, is to follow the Freedom Trail that winds through downtown and hits spots like Paul Revere’s house and Old North Church (where the lanterns that signaled to Revere were placed). There’s a trolley bus service that you can ride on that route. It’s on a hop-on, hop-off basis. Another trolley comes every few minutes. I rode that on our last day (my wife stayed at the B&B with back trouble). I only stopped at the two stops mentioned above, then rode it across the river to visit the USS Constitution AGAIN (since I was alone and wouldn’t be boring my wife, who’d been there with me over the weekend). I walked from there up to the Bunker Hill monument. It didn’t look like much of a hill from the Navy Yard, but it was quite a climb.
Another historical jaunt that we spent a whole day on was our trip to Quincy on our first day (on the T’s Red Line). We enjoyed it enormously because I’m a huge John Adams fan.
One other thing we particularly enjoyed — the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I had never heard of it before we went there, but it really blew me away. Isabella was probably the richest woman in America in the late 19th century, and she largely spent her fortune on art and cultural artifacts from all over the world — and then left it all for the world to enjoy. I sort of doubt that even Jeff Bezos could afford a collection like that today.
Have a great time!
Brad

Here’s hoping you see the message, and that you have a great time in Beantown!

What I learned in college this time

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My “report card,” as it were. There are a couple of things I wonder about on it, but I’m not going to rock the boat.

Remember a few months ago when I wrote about my college transcript from back in 1975, which I had just received from the university formerly known as Memphis State?

Well, it was a cautionary tale that warned youth not to be wastrels and get themselves in a hole, and then have to get almost straight A’s the last two years in order to barely pull their GPAs up to exactly 3.0.

I was so proud of that final grade, even though it came too late (the very last A I received, days before graduation, pulled me to that point) for me to sit among the cum laudes. Like I cared, right?

Now, I can afford to chuckle at that simple youthful pride, because we’ve got a whole new ballgame going.

At this moment in the Year of Our Lord 2026, my actual, official, real-life grade point average is now 4.0. My college record, right here at USC where last century’s sordid story began, is now… perfect. Pristine. Couldn’t be better. Not a hint of scandal.

Here’s my three-step formula for achieving this:

  1. Start your whole college career over, a full 50 years after the previous one ended. No one will judge you because no one will remember you. (This is a sort of time travel story, but for real.)
  2. Take one course, while your fellow students are killing themselves with full loads, and devote all your academic energies to doing exactly what the syllabus says to do. By doing that, earn an A.
  3. Don’t take any more courses.

At least, this is my plan at the moment. I may weaken at some point and blow the whole thing by taking another course. But right now, I’m holding solid at 4.0.

So, what did I learn by going back to college as a septuagenarian in this unimaginably distant future time? (When I was last in school, it still seemed to us that 1984 would never come. And 2001 was ridiculously far off.)

To start with the obvious, I learned a bunch of stuff about a field that interested me but that I had never studied before: Linguistics. I’ve always earned my living with words, and loved everything about them. Well, a lot of things about them, such as etymology, philology, and the relationships between different languages. My interest went well beyond English. I had spoken Spanish fluently as a kid, and had those two years of Latin and a bit of German in high school, and that had given me enough grounding to figure out a lot about other Western languages. But I wanted to know more, and now I do, so mission accomplished.

I gained a bit of further insight into myself. I think. I don’t know whether this is about me, or something about aging in general. Most of my life, I found learning easy (despite my abysmal grades) and I was always confident that I could learn and do anything. That’s apparently not true, or at least not anymore. I’ve found in recent years that I’m pretty good at learning things that interest me, and that my brain shuts down on other things. My head was for instance closed to the subfields of linguistics that were irrelevant to my interests, such as phonetics and phonology. I know how to talk, and I’m not planning to be a speech therapist, so it’s irrelevant to me where my tongue is or where in my throat or mouth air is constricted when I make a certain sound. And I didn’t care that, to quote Google AI, the symbol [ʃ], in the “International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, commonly known as the ‘sh’ sound.” I’m happy calling it “the ‘sh’ sound.”

I also had a bit of a problem with terminology, and I know that’s aging. I might know an answer, but if it involves a new term, I had to work at it some to come of with the word. That was not the case in my youth.

But I knew lots and lots of other stuff, and it was gratifying, in a petty way, to find that in the course of living our lives, we old guys actually have learned a boatload of stuff younger people don’t know. The professor would ask the class as a whole if they knew X, and look around, and I’d raise my hand and answer the question, and go on and talk a little about Y and Z, too. Sometimes, I wouldn’t bother to raise my hand, but just blurted it out. I did too much of this, and worried about it, and apologized after class about it to my professor, Stan Dubinsky, but he didn’t mind — not much, anyway. He kept saying he had wanted me in that class, which was an honors class, because he thought the other students would benefit from having an old writer and editor in the class. Personally, I suspect the kids were a little creeped out by the old guy who thought he knew everything.

As for my fellow students, I was very impressed with them. They were very bright, and knew a great deal for people so young. Some had specialized knowledge. One was from Syria, another from Vietnam, and they provided various insights from the perspectives of their first languages. Another was fluent in sign language, which was also touched upon in the course, and could stand up and give demonstrations.

But mostly, I didn’t learn how smart they were from class discussions — the way it would have been when I was their age. Although the prof — Stan Dubinsky — managed to bring them out a bit toward the end, I was amazed earlier in the term that they were so reticent. They hardly said anything, even when called upon individually. This was the precise opposite of the clamorous verbal competition in which I eagerly and aggressively participated in high school and college.

I wondered at it, and wondered aloud to various people when not in class. Someone suggested it had something to do with their COVID experiences. I don’t see how. If I had been at home from school for several months, or a year, I’d have come back like a bomb ready to explode with classroom debates, on any subject that came up.

Personally, I think it has to do with the economics of higher education. In my day, college was not a big, high-stakes, stress-causing endeavor. As I’ve written, it cost me $174 a semester to take a full load at Memphis State. No, that wasn’t a small bill at that time, but my parents could easily write that check twice a year. And they weren’t rich. My father was a naval officer in the days long AFTER such sources of wealth as prize money.

Now, affording college is a meat-grinder, and the stress starts early and lasts for decades after. By the time they’re in high school, kids — I mean the ones like my classmates, who were honor students — have had it fully impressed upon them that they have to excel, and get all the scholarships they can. And after graduation, they have a debt that is frequently as large as a house mortgage, and just as much of a burden.

Consequently, the smartest students might tend to bury their noses in the books and keep stumm, rather than publicly attracting attention.

That’s my theory, based on a sample of one classful of students, which you might say is not a scientific sample. It could well be that all the other classes are voluble, and these young people were simply freaked out by the weird, talkative old guy in their presence. Anyway…

The way I knew they were smart and thoughful was due to a teaching method that would, of course, have been impossible when I was their age. This was a neat thing that Stan did.

At first, I had been put off by his syllabus. There was going to be NO exam, which dismayed me greatly. Back in my slacker days, I passed courses by acing the exam, after doing none of the homework or studying that was expected. The usual stuff wasn’t going to work, so I applied myself to the tasks I was bad at — showing up on time, doing the reading, doing the homework, turning in projects on time — all of which was built solidly into the final grade. And did I mention I got an A?

As to the cool teaching method. Aside from the homework — exercises from the main textbook — each week we also turned in notes on our readings. This was a remarkable device. Of course, we were turning these in by email. Stan would put everybody’s notes into a single file, and highlight questions or remarks, and answer them in red type. Then, he’d share the whole file on a projectors during class, and review our thoughts and his answers. Finally, he’d send the file to all of us for closer reading or for our records.

From this, I think I learned more about my fellow students, and how bright and thoughtful they were, than I would from any amount of loud debate in class.

Maybe other professors do this, even though I thought of it as a Stan thing. Maybe they don’t talk because they no longer have to. In a way, that’s sad. But in another, it’s encouraging. I remember that decades ago, the semiotician Umberto Eco predicted that in the future, people would use written language less and less. (At least I think that’s what he said; I can’t seem to find confirmation of that.) If he did say it, he found he was a little off, as the internet allowed “legions of idiots” the same power as a Nobel Prize winner to express themselves — in writing, however poorly worded — to the entire planet, in seconds. Once their thoughts were heard only at the end of a bar. Now, they were published to a readership far greater than that of The New York Times. Hence our dysfunctional politics today. We have lost the ability to engage in rational discourse.

But I feel better now. My classmates have reminded me that smart people write, too. And they do it quite well. Now if we could just find a way to make their thoughts more available than all the shrieking nonsense out there.

A sample from my reading notes. You’ll note I didn’t so much ask questions as argue.

Still struggling with technical problems…

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Hey, y’all, you remember that a few days back, my blog crashed, and my hosting service jumped in to save it, but in the process made changes that have led to other problems, such as a tsunami of spam comments.

These problems continue. I just glanced to see, and I had 62 comments pending, and the vast majority appeared to be junk.

Well, my priority is to fix that before I get to the routine business of moderating the real comments. I don’t have time to do either tonight, and hope I can make a successful phone call to GoDaddy tomorrow, but I might not, because we’re getting ready for a celebration of two of my granchildren graduating from high school, and that takes priority.

I used to have more patience with malfunctioning blogs. I don’t anymore. I don’t mind dealing with them when they’re working, but not otherwise.

Here’s hoping we’ll be back to normal in a day or two…

Meanwhile, here’s somebody I’d like to vote for

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If you have a good memory, you may recall that when I was James Smith’s communications director, I worked with a young guy named Noah Barker, as I mentioned him a couple of times back then.

And when I say “young,” I mean he was 17, and just days out of high school when I joined the campaign that July, and he was preparing with great excitement to vote for the first time.

But you wouldn’t have known he was that young if you had talked politics with him without seeing his face. He had the kind of encyclopedic knowledge not only of the present situation, but of the political history of our state and nation (something I like to talk about, since back in the day, our politics made some sense).

He was also the only staffer on the campaign who had actually won a gubernatorial election. At the time, he was the serving governor of Boys State. Which may not sound like much to you, but it was at least something.

Since then, Noah has gotten through college and started a career, and stayed extremely involved in politics even as I’ve put it behind me. He worked as a volunteer to help Joe Biden get elected in 2020, God bless him, and has helped run a bunch of campaigns on a more modest level — legislative, local council and the like. And he’s won some of them — which despite my advanced age and abundant wisdom, I have never accomplished.

Now, he’s running for office himself. On June 9, he’s seeking the Democratic nomination to represent District 70 — the Kershaw/Richland district in which he’s lived all his life — in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Now, you may smile indulgently and say, “Of course he’s running for office. You knew Noah would do that eventually.” And that’s true enough. But in his case he has an excuse, a reason, a justification for running that most people of any political persuasion you can name would probably see as sound. The first issue on his Issues page is this:

Showing Up

When we elect a legislator, we expect them to show up and do their job. Our current representative in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Robert Reese, doesn’t show up to work.

In his first term as our state legislator, Reese has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to skipping votes. So far, he has missed 153 votes.

That’s 153 times that our district has been left voiceless. That is unacceptable…

For Noah, this is not just a statistic he read somewhere. As a legislative monitor, he’s at the State House every day the General Assembly is in session, and all too often his representative is not.

I’m believing Noah on this. Since I’m no longer being paid to do real journalism, I have not called his opponent to cry “J’Accuse…!” and demand he justify himself. In fact — and you can dismiss all I say on this basis if you’re so inclined — I don’t know Rep. Reese. (I hear that quite a few legislators don’t know him, either, so I don’t feel alone on that point.)

If Mr. Reese presents overwhelming evidence that either he has too been there, or that his absences are entirely justified, I’ll be happy to run that, too.

But his quality of representation is not why I, personally, would vote for Noah if I lived in his district. I have a bunch of other reasons. Two big ones are:

  • The rest of what’s on his Issues page. Sure, I might be able to quibble on a point or two — there’s not one person on this planet I would agree with about everything. But what he has here is solid, sensible, pragmatic stuff that has nothing to do with what political tribe he belongs to, or whom he resents, or where he stands in the Kulturkampf. And although this shouldn’t be remarkable at all, the thing that really makes his list stand out is that all these issues are actually relevant to the office he is seeking. That’s because unlike most candidates (and definitely unlike most voters), Noah actually has an extensive, working understanding of the job he is seeking.
  • Everything else I’ve learned about Noah over the years.

Bottom line, Noah is the kind of person I’m always hoping to find on a ballot and seldom do these days. His intelligence, his moral compass, his sincere passion about his state and country, his willingness to work hard not just for people who look like or sound like or think or feel like him, but everyone in our society… they all add up to a rare opportunity for voters.

Noah, unlike me, is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, which is fine because he fits into that small subset that is too rare in his party (and in the Trump era, almost nonexistent in the other party). I’m talking about people I’d go out of my way to vote for: James Smith and Mandy Powers Norell, Joe Biden, Russell Ott, Joe Riley, Vincent Sheheen, Joel Lourie, and God Rest His Soul, Jimmy Carter.

You see that picture at the top of this post? I shot that of him last year, standing behind his car after we’d had coffee in Five Points to talk about his candidacy. Note the green bumper sticker to the left in the picture. That is not a sticker issued by an “Andy Beshear for President” campaign. Noah had it made himself. He likes Andy Beshear, and he loves Jimmy Carter, and so he made for himself a Beshear sticker in the Jimmy Carter style. When Jimmy ran in 1976, I’d never seen a green campaign sticker. It was quite distinctive, and I really liked it. So does Noah. Look at his website’s color scheme.

How does this kid know that? Well, he does. He also understands something that too few people of any political persuasion understand these days, which is that LBJ was probably the most effective president this country has had since FDR, and he accomplished a staggering number of huge, good things for this country. Hence that other sticker.

Well, that’s all I want to say, except that I’m proud of Noah and the campaign he’s running, and he’d better send me one of his bumper stickers, which I understand are a lot like Jimmy’s. I can’t vote in his district, but I can put one of those on my old truck. Maybe it will do him some good somehow…

I’m happy to say I NEVER talked like that…

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I hadn’t thought about Doonesbury in awhile, but Mullins McLeod brought him to mind this week with one of his campaign texts.

There are a number of reasons one might not choose him as our governor, some more lurid than others, but this text (and the others like it that punctuate my days with unsolicited beeping) would be enough to keep me off his bandwagon:

Do not be deceived this election. My opponents are not for the people; they represent the political class and donor class.

The biggest threat the people of S.C. face is our own government selling us out to artificial intelligence because once you replace human intelligence with A.I. there will be no more jobs.

My opponents’ websites do not talk about data centers or A.I. stealing our jobs. One of them is invested in A.I. and the other voted for the Energy Security Act which allows power companies to raise our power rates to ensure their profitability as data centers are built. He also voted to allow data centers to conceal from us how much of God’s gift to us, our water, they take from us. I am the only candidate calling to shut down data centers before it’s too late.

I am also the only candidate who: demands a livable wage; demands increased pay for teachers; shuts down crony capitalism and insider deals; reduces our income tax; attacks power companies who raise our bills; helps student loan borrowers; protects our elderly; fixes the state pension and guarantees a veto on bills that limit women’s healthcare rights.

You judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done. The contrast between my record of being the voice of the people when it matters the most speaks for itself…

… and yadda-yadda.

Immediately, when I read that, I remembered this Doonesbury strip from 1973:

It was one of Trudeau’s all-time best. Phred the retired (he thought) Viet Cong has been called back up, and finds himself listening to the kind of bloviating nonsense he hasn’t heard in awhile. He had my sympathy when the strip first appeared, and he has it now.

Back to Mullins… we’ve all seen this kind of appeal to vague resentments and suspicions before — far, far too often. These days, it makes sense to call it the Trump approach. You want to get elected, and you know there are a bunch of people out there who have a lot of rumbling resentment about things they can’t quite put their fingers on, so you tell them you’re the answer to their disaffection. You tell them you’re with them, and against all those folks in, as Mullins puts it, “the political class and donor class.”

You toss out a long list of promises — a wall to keep Mexicans out, or a living wage, or whatever. But one thing you don’t do, if you’re Mullins, is explain how you’re going to get a Republican Legislature to do these things.

And while you say “judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done,” he doesn’t bother to list any, you know, deeds he has done. His website is light on those as well.

This post is not intended to pick on Mullins McLeod particularly. That text just hit the button that made me think of that strip, and I wanted to share it because I’ve always thought it was brilliant.

But no, I would not vote for him. Nor would I vote for most of those people over in the other primary. If you really want to get depressed about the state of politics in America, go over and review some of their nonsense. It follows the same formula — show you resent the same things they resent, and get them to vote for you on that basis (which is, seriously, not a rational basis for governing):

Nancy Mace has a plan to work with President Donald Trump and stem the tide of illegal immigration. She is also the only governor’s candidate to actually fire a sanctuary sheriff in South Carolina!

Nancy Mace has a plan to address crime in South Carolina since our Attorney General and Solicitors won’t do their job.

(Pam Evette:) I’ve been with you from the beginning. I’ve been with President Trump from the start, and I’ve been fighting for conservative values every single day — as a mother, as a businesswoman, and as your Lieutenant Governor. What we’ve seen with President Trump, we can experience in South Carolina

Ralph Norman knows that to change the system, you can’t be a part of it. In Congress, he’s a member of the House Freedom Caucus, pushing to make legislation more conservative and hold weak-kneed politicians accountable for every dollar spent.

To translate…

  • I don’t like those wetbacks any more than you do. And if I find somebody givin’ ’em sanctuary, I’ll kick his ass! I’ve done it.
  • Note that the guy I claim without justification is not doing his job is running against me!
  • I love that guy that you all love because he hates the same people you hate. I promise more of what he’s brought to America. Of course, I’ve never done a thing in office for South Carolina, but you can see I have the right attitude!
  • You can’t be a part of the system… the way, you know, I have been for more than 20 years — holding office and accomplishing nothing while ranting about what an outsider I am.

That’s enough about them. Back to the Dems…

I don’t know Jermaine Johnson, but people who do say he’s a good guy. Of course, he engages in some of the same kind of rhetoric, although perhaps with greater justification:

Dr. Jermaine Johnson wasn’t born into power—he fought his way into it. He’s not a career politician or a wealthy insider…

In his defense, he does list some things he’s actually done, on this page of his website, but it doesn’t take up a lot of space:

In his first term alone he passed a bill to lower sales tax for seniors, repaired a bridge that had been closed since the 2015 Thousand Year Flood and expanded broadband access. Since then, he began construction on an emergency medical center in rural Lower Richland, struck down an anti- DEI bill, and commissioned a statue of Civil War hero, congressman, and civil rights champion Robert Smalls.

Still, it’s something.

Billy Webster can’t claim all that much himself. Of course, he hasn’t held elective office — although he can point to his service in Dick Riley’s U.S. Department of Education.

And in his defense, I found this page of his site refreshing. Nothing about “I resent the same things you do!,” and serious words about things that an actual governor of an actual state ought to be concerning himself with…. Infrastructure, education, healthcare…

My main concern about Billy is his involvement in payday lending. But I haven’t made up my mind about him, either.

And I’m not sure it matters, for two reasons:

There is not one strong, well-known candidate with a proven ability to win a statewide election in the entire Democratic field. No one with a measureable fraction of the experience and name recognition of James Smith or Vincent Sheheen. And they couldn’t get elected in this state. I’m as certain as I can be that none of this year’s candidates have anything resembling a chance. That means the winner of the Republican primary is going to be governor.

The Republcan field, with one exception, is crammed with with people with no useful abilities or relevant experience, and their heads mostly seem crammed with a bunch of nonsense that would never do South Carolina a scrap of good, and probably would do a good bit of harm. So the most important thing is that none of those people get the nomination.

Yeah, the one exception is Alan Wilson. He’s a solid guy — a decent, trustworthy man who has served capably, at the statewide level, for 15 years. I would trust him with the office of governor, and I don’t think he’d let South Carolina down.

You might find it hard to tell that from his website and ads. He can’t be governor without winning the Republican primary, and he knows most of the people who vote in that are people who think having Donald Trump running our country is a good idea.

So we’re treated to things like the appalling “Alan Wilson is Trump-Tough” page. Lord have mercy upon us.

But elsewhere, you’ll find something approaching the kind of pragmatic, to-the-point addressing of issues that I liked on the Webster site. There’s some silly ideological junk there, too, but I’m never going to get what I want at this stage in our history, so I go for what seems least bad.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, eh? Well, it’s not endorsement. This post started exactly as I wrote it. I got irritated by the latest example of McLeod’s ideological nonsense, and got a smile out of remembering a joke from long ago, making fun of the same sort of stuff. Then I figured I’d look around and mention the other people, too.

After all, we do have this election coming up…

The return of the bots

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Not this kind of Spam — which frankly, I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid. No, the other kind…

Well, this is weird…

I saw I had 9 comments awaiting moderation, so I went to deal with them, and they were all spam. I haven’t seen those in awhile — like, years. I guess something happened when the folks at Godaddy did that emergency rebuild to bring my blog back to life yesterday. I know they ditched a bunch of plug-ins. Maybe one of those was protecting me from “comments” such as:

Ignite your originative spark with compound THCA flower. Because hybrids like buy thca flower online connexion the recess between rational distinctness and mortal relaxation, they are incredibly favourite to each artists, writers, and thinkers. It provides due ample physical placidity to calm the fidgets while keeping your certain acrimonious, running, and at the ready to brainstorm. Observation a balanced movement situation like not in a million years before.

A “balanced movement situation?” What is this, dope or laxatives?

Anyway, beyond the amusement, I’m worried that maybe real comments aren’t getting through. In fact, I’m kind worried that no one has been able to see the blog at all.

Let me know if you’re seeing this…

Good for Shane Massey, and the others who voted ‘no’

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Here’s how the NYT recorded this momentous moment at our State House.

Well, the madness has passed us by, for now. Or at least that wave of it has.

I mentioned yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey was expected to oppose Trump’s plan to usurp (for his own purposes, as is his wont) a key responsibility of our state Legislature — drawing election maps. And he stood up and did so in fine style:

“If we don’t consider the concerns of South Carolina, there is no one left,” Massey said. “We are the last lines. I have too much Southern blood in me to surrender.”

Amen to that, brother Shane. It’s time that someone in this state stood up for for a States’ right that matters, and is entirely justified. Something good, instead of, you know, what our ancestors stood up for that other time.

Enough Republicans stood up with him to defeat the effort to eliminate the sole Democratic member member of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, Jim Clyburn.

These are the other four:

  • Sean Bennett, R-Summerville
  • Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms
  • Tom Davis, R-Beaufort
  • Greg Hembree, R-Little River

Good for Tom Davis and the rest.

Those were the votes that took courage. Of course, they would have accomplished nothing if the Democrats hadn’t all been voting against it. The Dems celebrated appropriately after:

South Carolina Senate Democrats welcome today’s defeat of the sine die resolution that would have allowed the legislature to return for a politically motivated special session on congressional redistricting.

“Today’s vote sends a clear message that South Carolina should not be dragged into another unnecessary and divisive redistricting battle driven by Washington insiders,” said Senate Democratic Leader Brad Hutto. “South Carolinians rejected a politically motivated power grab orchestrated by a White House shaped by perpetually online New York City activists with little understanding of South Carolina. The people of this state expect us to focus on real issues affecting their daily lives, not carry out an outside political agenda.”

Senate Democrats will continue fighting for fair representation, transparency, and a government focused on the needs of South Carolina families rather than national political gamesmanship.

Brad Hutto was also quoted in The State as saying:

“We just don’t take documents from Washington and say ‘thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am.’ We are the deliberative body,” Hutto said.

No, we don’t. I was afraid we might be, that we might do what just happened in Tennessee, but for now South Carolina did the right thing. It’s nice to be able to say that.

The utter madness going on now at a state capitol near you

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One of the maps being discussed.

Unbelievably, I just learned about this last night, because as y’all know I’m not paying NEARLY as much attention to news as I once did.

Perhaps you’ve been as inattentive as I have. I hope not. But in any case, none of us knows how it’s going to turn out.

I’m talking about this.

Here’s another version from The State.

What’s going on in this: Donald Trump is trying his best to redraw all the Southern states’ maps (and maybe others as well; I’m just looking at the South here) so that there is no hope of them ever electing another Democrat. No Jim Clyburn, and so forth. This is all sparked by the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Louisiana map, which has thrown the doors open to this sort of thing. This is now apparently a big part of his vision of becoming permanent Fürher of America, along with such things as changing the rules so he can run for a 3rd time in what would likely prove to be our last presidential election (in his lifetime, anyway), and making sure he can win it in the House, no matter what the voters say.

I had sorta, kinda been following this — elsewhere. My wife, who’s from Memphis, had focused my attention on what Tennessee just did. They had torn apart the 9th Congressional District that since the early ’70s had been mostly electing black representatives. (I voted for the first of those, Harold Ford. Later regretted it. But I liked his son.) So now, black Memphians (who are the majority in the city) are raging about the “racist” map, and the current incumbent (who, incidentally, is white and the first Jewish congressman from Tennessee, and can’t really play the usual Memphis race card), is talking about the indiscriminate elimination of Democrats.

Which is somewhat more to the point in the Memphis case. If Trump thought black members would support him as slavishly (and that’s the word here) as white Republicans do, he’d be looking for a way to make ALL the districts majority-minority, if that were possible. For that matter, if only Democrats loved him as the terrified Republicans do, he’d go for more Dems. He’s not particular. But neither of those fantasies being the case, he’ll settle for a plan that elects only Republicans. He only cares about Number One — never forget that.

As for SC, I only heard about this last night from a Democratic friend whom I had called about something else entirely. I’ve talked to a couple of other people since then — well, one other person, a Republican. But I’m trying to reach a lobbyist by text who can tell me what the hell is going on right now. Other that, I’ve been reading but not learning much. Because going into today, nobody knew what was going to happen. This is moving very fast.

It seems it will depend on whether the Senate goes along with a last-second reapportionment. I hear Majority Leader Shane Massey is against it, but I can’t swear to that. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, over in the House, I hear about Republicans running around talking about the latest “White House map.”

Y’all do understand the extent to which this means we are living in a different country than the one in which I have spent most of life. Right? Sure, presidents have always been highly interested in the makeup of Congress, and therefore very interested in the maps, and quietly keeping track of what’s happening.

But that’s not THIS America, in which the president openly barges in and takes over this process, and his minions in Columbia are unembarrassed about making it clear what’s going on.

You see, folks, legally — constitutionally — remapping is entirely the responsibility and prerogative of state legislatures. In any previous decade, lawmakers of both parties would have been fiercely defending their turf, furious if any mere president tried to muscle in.

But not these guys. Not in Trump World.

We won’t even get into the completely uncaring betrayal of the Legislative Black Caucus, which in the early ’90s made the deal with the Republicans that let the GOP take over the S.C. House. But let’s not be too harsh in judging today’s Republican members. They, and their Master, are even more ignorant about history than most Americans. Thirty years ago, when that deal with the caucus was made, I doubt Trump knew where South Carolina was, much less which party was running it. (Here he is in those days.)

At the top of this post, I’ve including one of the maps that’s been floating around. If they go ahead with this, no telling what the final version will look like. This one is intriguing. It does away with the salamanderlike district the Republicans drew for Clyburn back then — not to elect a Democrat, but to get all those black voters out of their districts, to make them “safe.”

So the new 6th looks “normal.” it also looks like something they may regret if they go for it. That Democrat I spoke with about this last night is already thinking about running for it.

But what do the doofuses in the White House know about the political geography of South Carolina?

OK, I’m back. I think…

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Looks like I’m back to DEFCON 5. Whew…

I’m just emerging from a blog crash that occurred around 9 or 10 last night.

After trying for a couple of hours last night to reach a human with my host, I gave up and started over this morning.

Eventually, about 10 minutes or so ago, I was able to log in again — only to find a slight problem in the dashboard. I’m hoping my new buddy at the host — I’ve got his email now — can straighten that out.

Meanwhile, while the experts were working on the disaster this morning, they apparently switched me to the new, improved, ultra-modern writing interface. I’m using it now. I have no idea what the result will be.

But after he fixed the little red warning problem I mentioned above, I may ask my new friend to restore the interface I’m used to. I feel a little like the deputy in the first episode of “The Walking Dead,” coming out of a coma and finding the world is way different that what I knew.

When I get these things sorted, I’ll resume blogging. First topic: This reapportionment mess over at the State House. Something dramatic is likely to happen on that today. I hope Shane Massey sticks to his guns, and the rest of the Senate goes along with him. We’ll see.

I was going to go to the State House and ride herd on this today, but instead of that, I’ve been struggling to put out the aforementioned fires.

See you soon…

Willkommen im Stalaggarten

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From a garden to Stalag Luft III.

Speaking of trying to foil wildlife, I’ve done quite a bit of upgrading to our raised-bed garden since I put out those fig trees.

See how natural and innocent it looked back then?

Well, not long after that, something ate off one of the three measly leaves the smaller of the two trees back. And it still hasn’t been able to grow any new ones since then.

My wife had donated that space, since she didn’t feel up to the struggles of gardening this year — too many hassles, too little produce. So I decided I would do the rest of the boxes — except one we’ve left fallow for the year. Of course, I’m planting okra. That’s my area of agricultural specialization.

But while I was planting the okra, I was thinking about that missing figleaf. I was also thinking about how the deer (who dwell in those woods you see beyond the garden) had feasted on my okra leaves the last couple of years (not the pods, just the leaves — which of course kills the plant). Last year, we put up fences with those green poles and light plastic netting around a couple of the boxes.

This year, with my heavy investment in okra — and the danger to the figs — I went much bigger — I used heavier netting, and I went all around the whole shebang, except for the fallow box. I left one small, easily-blocked gate where I can get in and have access to all the boxes.

I was very proud when I finished putting it up two days ago, just before the rain came.

But then, the next time I walked out, intending to admire it, instead of a garden I saw … one of these. Yeah, a POW camp. A Stalag.

But it isn’t! This isn’t to keep people in! It’s to keep critters out!

It’s morally very different, I think. Oh, and if you think I’m trying to starve the deer like The Squirrel, note all those leaves right behind the garden. Millions of them. Also, I planted some okra in large tubs outside the wire. It’s my “rabbit garden,” only for deer.

And for The Squirrel, I may put out a dish of sunflower seeds. I think that’s what he’s after in the bird feeder…

Don’t tell me I’m going to have to build guard towers now…

Wile E. Squirrel, foiled once again! Beep-beep!

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Yeah, that’s right — you can’t get to it! Hahahahaha!

We enjoy our little victories while we can.

Yesterday, I finally stumped my adversary in the battle to keep seed in the feeder for the birds.

Yes, I’m talking about The Squirrel. I use the singular because — although it’s probably been quite a number of them over the years — I only ever see one at a time. Also, lately I think it’s been the same ctitter. He’s gotten quite fat off his crimes.

I capitalize it because we also capitalize Wile E. Coyote. Archenemies have proper names, you see. In this metaphor, the multiple birds I’m trying to feed are, collectively, the Roadrunner. (Some, after hearing of my efforts to foil the rodent, may think I’m Wile E. and The Squirrel is the Roadrunner. But I don’t accept such wildly erroneous interpretations.)

As in other forms of warfare, new measures tend to engender countermeasures. For instance the chariot was unstoppable for centuries in ancient times, but countermeasures — phalanxes, hoplites and the simple engineering feat of digging trenches — put an end to their dominance.

This, too, started simply. We used to hang feeders on a short bar from the deck rail. But that was too easy. We went to the long bar years ago. The Squirrel adopted effective countermeasures — not only climbing out on the bar and down to the feeder (sometimes hanging upside-down by their toes to eat), but more dramatically, simply leaping from the rail to the feeder. They do it in trees, so why not here.

But for some time, I have been working on a foolproof (I thought) countermeasure to their derring-do. I pondered for some time how to construct a wall along the bar that could not be bypassed — if The Squirrel tried to climb over it, it would spin around and drop him (I see him as male because as a gentleman, I refuse to have a lady as an archenemy). I found that orange thing — manufactured to sit in the bottom of a huge plant pot — at Lowe’s. It had a large hole in the middle, easily bigger than the bar.

I set it up, and put it out at a new angle. (I’m getting way technical. I’m like the Werner von Braun of anti-squirrel technology. There’s math and everything.) The new position goes straight out from the corner of the deck so that it’s at an obtuse angle from both of the rails that meet at the corner, meaning that the orange thingy would effectively block a leap from either direction.

And it worked. The picture above shows it working. This was my moment of triumph. I’m so happy I witnessed this moment and was able to photograph it. In the above image, you see The Squirrel beholding his defeat with resignation. He’s squatting there regarding my invention. He did that for five or ten words, occasionally tipping his head the way a puzzled dog does.

Finally, he walked out a bit on the rail, with the idea of trying his chances anyway. He eyed the target, and tensed his fat body up for the leap… and then changed his mind. He slunk off into the bushes you see to the right, and was not seen for the rest of the day.

I didn’t think he’d given up — not my archenemy, no way. I pictured him in his lair cooking up an invention of his own, maybe on the lines of some of these.

But what he came up with was simpler, though. He found that he still had a good angle for a leap from the bushes that you see to the right. My wife saw him pigging out on the upper level of the feeder this morning.

So I’m going to get out my poletrimmer and cut that bush back — at the very least, make it too low for him to have a good trajectory for the leap.

That’s OK. That’s the way things go — measure, countermeasure, measure, countermeasure, on and on. And yeah, I know — squirrels gotta eat, too.

But I enjoyed yesterday. I really did…

Frustratin’, ain’t it?

Reminiscing with Lamar

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My brother-in-law in Memphis sent us this link to a tweet by Lamar Alexander, two-term governor of Tennessee, two-year Education secretary, and three-term U.S. senator — one of the last remaining hopes of moderate Republicans until he retired in 2020…

I responded to Steve in Memphis with my own anecdote:

I heard his story about how he decided to run again when I was flying on the campaign plane with him in 1978, one late night not long before the election. He was just chatting with a reporter from The Tennessean, and they were enjoying an end of the day drink, and I sat off to the side, quietly taking notes. I wrote a story about his description of his comeback, and it was the first time John Parish, the Dean of Tennessee journalism, told me I’d written a good political story.

Alexander was reminiscing, so I thought I’d reminisce along with him.

Of course, I’m sure Lamar doesn’t remember me. I was a rookie reporter experiencing my first statewide election (and in Tennessee, a statewide election is stateWIDE, which is why they have to fly back and forth a lot). I was just with him that one week — Parish had stepped back to allow both another reporter and me to have a week each with both nominees. I spent the next week with Jake Butcher (it became apparent to me that Jake had no business running for governor, and for once in that rookie year, the voters proved me right).

Lamar and the Tennessean guy were totally relaxed; the reporter and he were just chatting over drinks; those day were long and hard. But I was scribbling away. Being a rookie, I sort of wondered whether what I was doing was ethical — grabbing a story off Alexander’s answers to the reporter’s questions. But they could see I was taking notes. And I could see the other guy wasn’t. I just charged ahead. I think we ran the story the day after he won the election. And I got a pat on the head from The Bear. Which meant a lot back then.

I got to know Alexander better when he was governor from 1978-85. He used to drop by the paper and visit now and then when I was news editor in Jackson. But I wasn’t surprised when he came to see us at The State more than a decade later when he briefly ran for president in 1996, and I mentioned those days, and he didn’t really seem to remember. Never mind. Too bad he had to drop out in ’96. He’d have been a much better nominee than Bob Dole….

I’ll close with a picture taken on that campaign plane. Not at night, but in the early morning, when the candidate was alert and ready to go…

Lamar Alexander, back when we were all young.

How famous are these celebrities to you?

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Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho on Celebrity Jeopardy.

Here’s another one for my “Aging” catergory — although I suspect that’s not the whole story.

For quite some time — for decades, really — I’ve had this happen a lot: I’ll see someone on a magazine cover, or on a TV screen. This person is being presented in a context that indicates that he or she is a celebrity, and I as the beholder am expected to know who that is. There are hints. For instance, the magazine will be one that pretty much only features “celebrities” on its covers. Or the person will be identified by first-name only, as though I were a fantasist who imagines that I am on such intimate terms with that person. Or, the writer of that text believes that I would be insulted by anyone assuming that I would need to see a surname to know who it is.

As for television… I’ll give you an example from this evening. I was over visiting my mother, and she was watching “Celebrity Jeopardy.” Only I didn’t know who the people were. There was a man flanked by two women. The man looked familiar, but I couldn’t name him or recall where I had seen him. I had no clue with the women.

Fortunately, there’s the Web. I looked, and saw they were Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho. Patton was the guy who seemed familiar, and now that I saw it, so was his name. And I had heard or read Margaret Cho’s name quite frequently in recent years, in connection with comedy, but I could not have identified her by her image. This was worsened by the fact that when I Google her image, she looks different. But I wouldn’t have recognized her when she looked like that, either.

I thought “Celebrity Jeopardy” had more recognizable names and faces. Admittedly, I’m basing that on those SNL spoofs, which at least in the past have been hilarious. My favorite might have been the one with “Sean Connery,” “Burt Reynolds” and “French Stewart.”

And I actually knew whom they were impersonating.

Now I’m going to really embarrass myself. When I was quite young, I watched pretty much everything on the three channels available, and that includes the game shows. And I knew who all those people were — even on “Hollywood Squares.” Do you know who all these people were?

Well, I did. Even though that’s a very blurry picture. (I probably wouldn’t have complained about that in 1968, though. I was also watching it in black and white.)

I’m pretty sure that if I were younger, I would have known who those affable people were on Jeopardy tonight. After all, I knew the guy’s face and one woman’s name! I must apologize to Ms. Thede, though — I had no idea.

But I knew all those people on the Squares, and looking back, some of them were pretty marginal celebs. But I knew them, and could tell you where I’d seen them. For instance, Wally Cox had once played a birdwatcher on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I think I’d also seen him do standup. So there.

There were some people who were famous to me simply because they were on game shows a lot. I’d known Kitty Carlisle and Orson Bean for a couple of decades before I learned they were actors.

So some of it’s age. But here’s something I think is a significant contributing factor. I’ve mentioned this before in a different context:

It’s the profusion of available media in the post-cable, streaming world that makes it impossible to see and know everyone being beamed at us. So many people who are intensely famous within genres and subgenres of public entertainment, but not as known to the full population.

Back in the day, we ALL knew who all the “famous” people were.

I wasn’t the only person watching those three stations all the time in the ’60s. Everybody was, to some extent. Even old people saw The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, Robert Goulet, the inescapable Topo Gigio, and the guys who spun plates atop sticks. And with the possible exception of the guys with the plates, people of all ages could probably name them. That’s because they HAD to come to their fans and everyone else through the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Smothers Brothers, or Dean Martins’ show, or Andy Williams’, or Merv Griffin’s daytime talk show.

The supply was limited. That’s my excuse for sort-of knowing who “Charlie Weaver” was.

 

 

What do you trust AI to do?

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Real vs. AI. AI is so dumb, it ‘thinks’ it was being racially sensitive.

The pictures above are from one of texts from my linguistics course. The one on the left is real. The one on the right was created by artificial intelligence.

Don’t blame AI entirely. As we learned from Hal, who explained his behavior in “2001” in the sequel, “2010,” you have to be really careful how you program these machines.

Hal was programmed to remove any obstacle that threatened the success of the mission to Jupiter. If that meant killing those pesky astronauts on board, so be it.

The AI (Google’s LLM Gemini) that added a black member to the Wehrmacht “was apparently trained to generate (racially and ethnically) diverse, but had no way to know in what actual, factual contexts such diversity existed (or did not exist),” according to the book.

This happened in 2015. We know that AI is exponentially “smarter” today. But we would still do well to be careful in what we trust it to do.

Seeing that reminded me of something I recently realized about my own attitude toward artificial “intelligence.”

I’m not engaged in creating fake images that look real (although sometimes I do play around with Photoshop), so I’m not really concerned about ending up with fake black Nazis.

I write and edit. And ever since people around me (people who are not writers and artists) started using AI to generate text, I’ve thought, “I would never do that.” And not because I feared losing my job; I’m basically retired.

But I’ve avoided saying that, because I knew how people would react: “Look at the old Luddite who started out writing on manual typewriters!” Which I did; but I’m not a Luddite. I’ve enthusiastically embraced every new technology that has come along since those early days. I was usually at the vanguard of each change, and coached others in how to use it.

But not this. And one day recently, listening to some other people talking back and forth about the advantages and disadvantages of using AI, it suddenly hit me why I refused even to think about it.

No matter what technology was involved, I have never entirely trusted anyone else to express something I wanted to say. Oh, sure, I trusted my reporters and my associates on the editorial board. But I coached them ahead of time on how to write it, and as editor had complete control of the final form.

Sometimes I would rewrite it completely. Not because I was smart and they were dumb. I did the same thing to myself. Over and over, I would write an entire column and then throw it away and rewrite it entirely — sometimes I’d be so disgusted with the draft I’d even abandon the subject and write about something else.

No matter how much I fed to the machine ahead of time, when it was done, I’d be dissatisfied and rewrite it, taking pretty much as much time as if I were rewriting something I or a trusted subordinate had written.

So where’s the advantage in doing it in the first place?

So I basically just use AI to help with searches, and I apply plenty of caveats to that. Just as a way of sniffing the air as I start out on serious work; I always dig deeper than Google’s AI shows me.

So what about you? In what ways do you use AI, and to what extent do you trust it?

Remember Hal?

One of my favorite Bible passages

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The Flight of the Prisoners (1896) by James Tissot; the exile of the Jews to Babylon

I said I’m getting close to finishing James Kugel’s book about How to Read the Bible, and I am. I’m in the last 100 pages. (It’s taken me months because I just read a few pages at a time during meals. Just a few pages give you a LOT to digest. It’s very deep.)

Anyway, over breakfast this morning, during a chapter about Jeremiah, I ran across one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. I wrote about this bit before in 2009. Right after I got laid off, Rep. Nathan Ballentine brought it to my attention, for which I am grateful. I’d never read it before.

It’s in Jeremiah 29. Here’s the part I got from Nathan:

11 For I know well the plans I have in mind for you—oracle of the LORD—plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.

But I like the whole chapter, which Jeremiah aimed at the Hebrews during their Babylonian exile. Especially this part:

4 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon:
5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their fruits.
6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters. Increase there; do not decrease.
7 Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare your own depends.

In other words, however bad you think things are, don’t give up on life. Embrace it, wherever you are. Build houses. Have children. Marry them off so you can have grandchildren. Don’t moan about being so far from Jerusalem. Stand in the place where you live. In fact, you should even “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you.”

This may look like the end, but as long as you engage life positively, things will be better someday.

The people of Judah returned to Jerusalem about 70 years after Nebuchadnezzer dragged them away, thanks to Cyrus the Great.

These are good words to ponder in the Trumpist era. Maybe I won’t get to return to the America I knew all my life before 2016. (The problems that caused his election are complex, and likely to outlive him.) If not, I still hope for my children and grandchildren. In the meantime, I’m living my life in this world with joyful gratitude for my blessings, and all the energy I can muster…

Remember that noise on ‘Lost?’

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After the infinitessimal bit of “rain” we got this morning, I went out to look at the garden — my fig trees, and the okra I recently planted.

And it was nice out there, with the world slightly moist, and everything green except the grass.

But it was hard to fully enjoy for the noise. I shot some footage (above) of the “forest” behind our deck, which has a sort of subtropical lushness, to capture the difference between that and the obscene, crashing mechanical noises filling the area.

It immediately reminded me of the bizarre noises the people on “Lost” kept hearing in the jungle, before they ever knew about the “smoke monster.”

That’s not what this was, though. About two houses away from us, workmen with large, clanking vehicles — including a huge, self-propelled chipper-shredder — were chewing up some trees that were recently felled in a neighbor’s yard.

Sounded like more than that, though…

Uh… what’s that noise in the jungle?

And now, my SECOND favorite team…

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Bad news for the Phillies, but good for the Braves.

This one almost snuck by me yesterday, until I ran across a live press conference about it on my MLBtv app…

You know about the Saturday Night Massacre in Boston. Just three days later, the bosses in Philadelphia got rid of the manager of my second favorite team — which was at the bottom of its division in the NL, just as the Sox were in the cellar of the AL East.

I’ve told you about my hierarchy of fave teams. Now I’m starting to worry a bit about Dave Roberts. But not really. They’re not only leading their division, but they’re tied with the Yankees for the best season so far in the big leagues, at .667. Which is good. I like Dave.

You know who’s got the best? My former favorite team, the Braves (see image above). They’re at .700. You know, the team MLBtv won’t let me watch, ever. It’s gotten to where I don’t think I can name a single player I used to watch who’s still in Atlanta.

At least I can still see Freddie Freeman out in L.A. — along with Mookie, who of course should still be in Boston…

The Dodgers are more than OK…