The Boston Marathon happened yesterday, on a cool, cloudy, foggy, and rainy Monday morning along the route from Hopkinton to Boston. I watched the start of the wheelchair racers and just missed the start of the elite groups going off for both men and women.

These athletes are truly in a class by themselves. The eventual wheelchair winners were so far in front that they had multiple-minute leads only a few minutes into the race. They were racing against the clock because there were no other racers in sight who could give them any kind of competition. The elite men were running 4:37 miles consistently for the first few miles, which, for the lack of a better word, is sick in an impressive way.

Marathon athletes are just a special breed.  

More profound than the discovery of fire or electricity.

This is how the CEO of Google described the advancements in artificial intelligence—AI. Will it all be useful? Needed? Or is it unfolding because we simply can do it?

I’m sure there are medical advancements and other applications that will enhance human health and general living conditions, if we can embrace them. But we already have a sense for what can happen when this kind of technology gets into the wrong hands. It has the potential to be misinformation and disinformation gone wild, uncontrollable.

Has the point already arrived, or will it soon arrive, when AI’s development will move beyond human attempts to manage it? Sometimes it seems like grown-up kids just playing around, seeing what they can come up with.

But there are echoes of Ian Malcolm, a fictitious character, yes, but also vessel of caution and wisdom who issued a warning: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Seems like that train is always leaving the station.

Our experience with my mom’s current hospitalization is doing little to bolster our confidence in the condition of healthcare in this country. We’re fully aware that there are staffing issues, that present staff feel overworked and underappreciated, perhaps residue from Covid-19. Blame it on Covid.

We have experienced this malaise and stress firsthand the last three or four days—miscommunication, lack of familiarity with Mom’s situation leading to incomplete and inaccurate info being shared with whoever is there with her, and a disappointingly prevalent atmosphere of short tempers and complaining. It’s enough to get one wondering just how competent some of the staff are—how thoroughly they’ve been trained or vetted, if vetting is something hospitals can even do (you’d think it would be).

Stepping back from the critique for a moment, Mom’s current roommate is like someone out of a textbook chapter describing coping skills and how to deal with difficult patients—loud, complaining, offering up her own opinions and diagnoses, though, in this case, also frightened by her own condition and prospects for getting better.

I realize the expectations placed on hospital staff—especially doctors and nurses- are high. They’re supposed to remain cool, calm, and collected even as some patients and their families act like complete assholes. And they’re supposed to know what they’re talking about! I can see how, after days on end of dealing with people for whom hospitals are by nature not a place they want to be, the staff feel the need to go on the defensive, to get chippy and give patients a taste of their own medicine. Or just stop caring. That’s one ugly spiral. Professionalism gets thrown out the window.

In my mother’s case, the stroke she’s had has rendered her incapable, as far as we can tell, of understanding much of anything. It has affected both her speech, and her ability to process information in her own head, to comprehend what others are trying to say or tell her. She appears to be employing some muscle memory in her responses, and she has basic motor function in her limbs. But within that, there is some loss of the same—she’s having to relearn how to drink from a straw and properly use a spoon and fork. And her stock response to practically every question is “good,” or “uhhuh.”

So… one might think that the hospital staff assigned to Mom might be aware of all this. And sometimes it seems that they’re not. Or, more discouragingly, that they just don’t have the time to give someone whose world has been turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye.

There’s just so much about MTG that I find disturbing—her willingness to stir things up, her penchant for speaking before thinking—if thinking is something that she does. Her language, her opinions, her general demeanor…

She comes to the aid of “Jake” Teixeira, holds up his male, Christian whiteness, says he must be an enemy of the Biden administration because of these characteristics.

Who is she talking to? Who is her audience? What are her objectives, the points she’s trying to make?

How did she get elected in the first place?

My mother has had a stroke, apparently. An MRI will likely confirm what has happened. She’s 90, but up until a couple days ago not what you might envision when you think of someone who’s 90. She’s had a series of challenges of late—perhaps consequence of her age and also not necessarily being good about reporting aches and pains over the years that probably should have been investigated.

Anyway, if you talked to Mom on the phone up until a couple days ago, you’d probably think she was much younger. But the current reality is that she can no longer speak in complete sentences, speaks largely in gibberish interspersed with an occasional lucid phrase. A drastic change for someone for whom words and conversation were bread and butter.

The brain is a remarkable organ. We’ll see what comes back in the days ahead.

Justin Jones and Justin Pearson have been reinstated to the Tennessee legislature. I’m not clear on what’s happened here, the procedure in place. It sounds like they are back in their seats but they have to run again for the office from which they were removed? I guess if I actually read up on this situation, some of the blanks might be filled in.

But let’s just go with the optics for now.

In a historically racist state, two black Democratic lawmakers are expelled while a white member escapes expulsion for joining in gun violence protests in the chamber’s gallery. The explanation given for the expulsions was that Pearson and Jones had used a bullhorn, while the third offender—Gloria Johnson, a white woman—hadn’t. I guess this might have provided clarity for the Republican supermajority to do what they did. Maybe it had little to do with race, and using a bullhorn after your mics are cut off was just a bridge too far…

The public reacted vociferously to these expulsions, bringing the pressure and making the Republican supermajority look bad. Thus the reinstatements. But now the two legitimately elected representatives have to go through another election– first a primary within 60 days, then a general election within 107 days. Both have said they will seek reelection.

Seems like alot of unnecessary rigamarole. And guns are still blazing.

How can it still take 5 minutes or longer for my laptop to boot up?

And how in the hell does top secret military information show up on a social media site for unwarranted eyes to see? The U.S. has some seriously debilitating chinks in its cyber armor, and Russia seems light years ahead of us when it comes to exploiting and exposing plans and weaknesses.

It’s the nature of the technology, I guess, but it’s also inexcusable. Holding our own in cyberspace is as critical as any other aspect of this fucking animosity we seem to want to perpetuate. We put people on the moon– almost fifty-four years ago– with the computing power found in a washing machine. It’s way past time we ramped things up and got our ass in gear.

Probably not the best analogy, and I’m sure the goal posts are constantly moving when it comes to cyber security, but you know what I mean. If we’re putting all our eggs in the internet basket, we better learn how to defend ourselves there.

Since the year began, we’ve been averaging more than 1 mass shooting per day—145 so far this year, the latest at a bank in Louisville, KY.

I suppose one could argue that there are lots of people and lots of guns, along with myriad media aching to cover “breaking news,” so it’s little wonder we hear about such things so often… it’s just the law of averages… people are gonna be in the wrong place at the wrong time somewhere, right? It’s a big country.

So, nothing to see here.

“… a warning for the GOP…” reads a portion of a headline from this morning’s newsfeed re the recent Democratic win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Yup, people are showing up and voting out the Party of Backwards, the party that can’t get the hang of keeping its ear to the ground or fingers on the pulse. The religious right can’t seem to help itself when it comes to issues that are hot-button for them but apparently for no one else—transgender laws, book banning, drag queens, etc. And their stance on abortion rights has met with opposition at every turn, to the point that the decision to overturn Roe v Wade may be revisited at some point in the near future.

Republicans are laser focused on taking things away— freedom of expression, control over one’s body, the opportunity to vote. They are often running scared. They have a corner on hypocrisy, claiming to be a party that values freedom but, as it turns out, freedom for a few, not for everyone. Those other issues that they apparently lose sleep over really don’t rise to the level of “issue” until they make them so, and then they only betray their fear and provincialism and irrelevance. And they make people mad.

What’s astounding is that, as a phantom ‘majority,’ (aka minority), they still wield so much power. It’s the dark math and magic of gerrymandering. And fearmongering. And white paranoia.

How is it that a judge in Texas can make a decision that stands in the whole country? Guess I should read up on our judicial system.

The guy sounds like just another cockeyed, bloviating, brainwashed Republican assassin.