ThereItGoes

"Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim" Dijkstra.

What is intelligence? Do we have a very good understanding of how language processing works in our own brains? While it involves certain centers is it also a full brain activity? You're getting into Minsky vs Rosenblatt

Though I don't think grandfather of hers was in that Southern line.

She told me we had family on the Mayflower. She signed my sisters up for Daughters of the American Revolution and thankfully didn't sign them up for that other organization. They were an old Southern family but I know some of them were interesting and even quite liberal. One helped start Vassar.

I'm am interested in the family I don't know anything about. She did a thorough job of my grandfather's side but has trouble with the two grandparents who were children of immigrants. My sister tried and had trouble.

I'm a bit more afraid of learning about my other grandmother's side.

family or generations near and around that time to create some added American heritage? Was there some revisionism later on? They were a political family. It would make sense if they wanted to create a larger myth.

I've heard of the DNA project and never want to hand over DNA.

My grandfather didn't look this information up. His grandparents probably didn't either. Why make it up? It's possible someone would. Did someone do genealogy long ago and make mistakes? Why would my family tell that story and leave out the guy who signed the Declaration? Did it matter to that

I need to find the binder that lady gave to me. There were a lot of people I didn't know about and a lot of "you might be related to this person if" and "but notice how often this first name pops up after" and things like that.

What's weird to me is that it's definitely an generational family story

never understood the underlying spirit of our Constitution. They're nationalists or nativists but not patriots. There is a difference. An immigrant can be a patriot on their first day. A nativist can spend their whole life and never know what America is all about.

Maybe it was that side of the family at some point trying to pull a JD Vance, trying to cement more prestige or something, who knows?

I've got the family history JD wishes he had and for us it's nothing but trivia.and it sickens me who these nationalists try to exclude. It makes me think they've

She's also the first to be named Virginia.

Want to know who that side of the family never mentioned? An ancestor who signed the Declaration. Others would be brought up but not that one. I think the Roanoke story, true or not, has been passed down from generation to generation for a very long time.

it abandoned. Someone who asked to do my genealogy said she thought it was true but there was a caveat. He was a cousin or a nephew or something like that. Maybe you can tell if it's bullshit. If true it means I'm also related to the first born English child in the New World, Virginia Dare.

Growing up one side of my family would tell my sisters and I we were related to the governor of Roanoke which would elicit the response of "bullshit, they all disappeared" and my grandfather or mom or whomever would say that our relative went back to England to get supplies and returned to find

They present themselves as resolute and fearless and like to pretend as if they were born possessing the traits of leadership but the truth is these people can't even handle talking.

Yes.

We need to mock them for scaring easily and for their histrionics. While you bring up the "warfighters" (I really hate that term) we need to mock culture warriors as the same. All these MAGA warriors present themselves as resolute and brave but they can't even handle talking in good faith.

The small ones can be fun especially the rolling kind. Seeing a street roll like a wave can really be something of an experience. They're not so fun when they jerk back and forth.

And when that day comes I don't know that I'm going to argue we need to be the reasonable ones --that we need to draw from the angels of our better nature.

It makes me very very angry.

I'm glad to see Newsom and others say they'll treat this as if it's a zero sum game.

Gerrymandering can backfire if enough people show up. It's not fool proof. Of course they'll make sure people can't vote.

Some day MAGA will have to accept they're a minority.

**or

It's one of those days where it really feels like we are in the bad timeline of the fucked up alternate universe.

Maybe someday we will get lucky and the rubes will realize they've been lied to for years.

Mace is a bad actor. It's embarrassing how little effort it takes for Republicans to froth up their base with nonsense. Mace could get away with claiming Clinton turned her into a newt.

@5gw.bsky.social

It's been awhile since I read those threads but take a look.

Nuclear reactors on the moon.

By "Vilifying" SVR Victim Julianne Smith, Kash Patel Establishes Precedent to Share the Epstein Files - emptywheel Kash Patel and Pam Bondi said they wouldn't release details about what Trump knew about Ghislaine Maxwell stealing girls from his spa, recruiting one into a sex slavery, because such disclosure would ...

By "Vilifying" SVR Victim Julianne Smith, Kash Patel Establishes Precedent to Share the Epstein Files

www.emptywheel.net/2025/08/04/b...

the primary method for crypto bros to cash out their crypto. This seems to be its purpose as best I can tell

It's important to note Trump is actively destroying the US dollar as a reserve currency. So will foreign businesses prefer stablecoin for doing cash transactions in dollars?

From a Grey Poupon commercial. A can of Grey Poupon is being handed from an outstretched hand coming out of one Rolls Royce to the outstretched hand coming out of the backseat of another.

I wonder what the commercials will be like?

Stablecoin is the preferred payment method for money launderers of taste and distinction.

The only way I can see stablecoin increasing the purchase of US bonds as the Trump administration destroys the US dollar as a reserve currency is if it becomes

It really makes no sense how media and others have cowed themselves to Republicans.

You have to wonder who will be dumb enough to take these kinds of positions?

There are people who are shameless enough. That's the majority of the Republican Party. Who will be dumb enough to take these positions?

Trump May Attempt to Disavow Project 2025 - but He's not Disavowing Viktor Orbán - emptywheel Trump may be disavowing Project 2025 -- or attempting to. But he's not disavowing Viktor Orbán, whose influence operations flow right through the Heritage Foundation. On the contrary, Trump and Orbán ...

I feel like this discussion could use a reminder that Project 2025 was a joint venture with Orbán's Hungary, and therefore a joint venture with Putin's puppet.

www.emptywheel.net/2024/07/12/t...

MAGA really is full of deplorables.....deplorables and or rubes. The dumbest among us are destroying this nation.

Wait, are they seriously trying to go after him for Hatch Act violations? The fucking Trump administration is complaining about imaginary Hatch Act violations?

Is that the point? When we talk about real violations they'll point to imaginary ones? Same with political prosecutions?

We need standards. Instead we have entertainment that pays pundits handsomely to lie, to argue in bad faith, and to come back day after day to do so. And the worst of it is that it's all under the banner of news or journalism.