Just as I had successfully dismissed all my concerns about AI — I had none — I read this from Harper’s Weekly Review:
[A]n AI-integrated teddy bear was pulled from the market after it offered advice on where to find knives in the home and how best to tie up a sexual partner.
Messing around with teddy bears is bad stuff, kids. Some sort of punishment may be required — but first put down those knives!
From Harper’s Weekly Review:
A teddy bear attached to a weather balloon and sent into the stratosphere by schoolchildren in England has not yet returned. “I am sure he is fine, as we have reassured the children he is very brave and resourceful,” said the children’s science teacher.
If sending the teddy up via a weather balloon indicates you’re attenpting to teach the kids something about science, maybe you should, I don’t know, withdraw that reassurance about the character of a teddy bear?
The ones no one refers to when convictions are announced: the people, i.e., us ordinary and unheralded participants in the American experiment, who sat on the many grand juries indicting the criminals and the many juries convicting them.
When Jack Smith had to withdraw the two criminal cases against Trump (his role as cheerleader for the January 6 assault, and the collector of those classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago pissoire), I roughly counted the grand jurors on the three grand juries who had indicted him, and thought, “There may be sixty-nine people like me who have been spat on.”
How many more grand jurors were slapped in the face by Trump when he pardoned the multiple January 6 criminals those jurors indicted and defendants who didn’t take pleas and were convicted by trial juries? How many of those jurors now see those convicts they faced in court on broadcast media as they try to resurrect their rotten careers as, well, whatever malevolent fantasies they have about themselves?
For every Honduran ex-president/massive drug dealer now walking free, count roughly twenty-four people like you and me who have been told they do not have the human significance of a first-class low-down criminal. Whom they, more than the rest of us, know is a low-down criminal: they saw all the evidence.
Here, via Perplexity.com, is a short list of Trump’s many infamous pardons granted to awful people who were indicted for actual crimes and convicted by jurors like you and me.
Back in June, 2023, BNE (Before Nightmare Era*), I interviewed my close friend, “Lily,” about how grand juries work. (I’d never been on a grand jury; she had.)
I re-read it just now and am…I have nothing more to say except the number of enraged anonymous jurors are expanding into a critical force. As are the number of judges who insist, along with the rest of us, that we live in a nation of laws.
And some day, not very far in the future, all of us will be eager participants in indicting and convicting many members of the utterly criminal gang occupying our Executive Branch.
As Gandalf might have said, “This. Will. Not. Stand!”
*An era can be as short as a year. It’s the impact upon the world (and the length of the PTSD) which makes it an era.
