Events

I finally broke down and tried Chat GPT 5, wasting no time to waste half an hour. The first thing I asked it for was to write a bit of code for me. I wrote similar code about 4 years ago, so I wanted to see if the LLM could at least match what I did. I was pleasantly surprised that, after two refining prompts, it came up with a better solution. And then I had it do this: (Image generated by Chat GPT v5 from original work by the author.) For comparison, here's the original: The Super Cassie image is the...

I just read the Rev. Rob Schenck's essay in Mother Jones explaining, from his perspective as an evangelical minister who only recently came out of his stupor in the Christianist right wing, how Christianists could follow a man like the OAFPOTUS. The tl;dr is that evangelical Christians tend to believe the craziest shit because, at root, they believe the craziest shit. The essay reminded me of two things: this joke, and Robert Heinlein's observation that "a religionist, having accepted certain...

By the best count I have available, this is the 10,000th post on the Daily Parker, going back to the very first news item posted on my very first website in July 1997. I am not entirely sure this is really the 10,000th post, however, for a number of reasons. First, BlogEngine.NET doesn't actually count posts; I've had to use some arithmetic. Second, I removed a small number (3 or 4) of posts over the years for various reasons. Third, at some point I merged some of the posts from the separate Inner Drive...

Purchased 2000-11-22

My Brews & Choos buddy highlighted this thought-provoking essay Jonathan Rauch posted yesterday in Persuasion; the whole thing is worth a read: Sheer aggressiveness is perhaps the postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature. Because they are revolutionary movements, they recognize few legitimate boundaries and observe few behavioral constraints; because they are anarchic, they have no grand plan or object beyond achieving dominance. Their signature style of no-holds-barred aggression was observed...

I don't approve at all of Israel's actions in Gaza after they removed any serious military threat from Hamas or Hezbollah more than a year ago. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration today that Gaza will become essentially a military protectorate of Israel means that, at least as long as Netanyahu can stay out of jail (his entire reason for staying in power at this point), Israel is no longer a democracy. That said, Israel's utter humiliation of Iran and removal of Iran's proxies from the...

Re-read from 2010 and 2016

Today is both the 80th anniversary of the United States dropping a nuclear weapon on Japan for the first time in history, and the 60th anniversary of President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. Since then, nuclear weapons have proliferated and voting rights have retreated. I think we can say both trends have gone in the wrong direction. And who better than the recently departed Tom Lehrer to put both in one song:

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming: “I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the...