February 18, 2025

I got Grok 3, and here's the first question I asked (and where things went).

"In the Latvian animated movie 'Flow,' what do viewers think has happened to make the world the way it is seen? It can't be Earth and it can't be rising waters of the sort our environmentalists warn us about."

I wrote about the movie yesterday, and here's my comment on that post with my explanation why it can't be Earth and does not depict a conventional earthly climate-change catastrophe. 

Grok 3 answered (so this is the first thing Grok 3 ever said to me):

February 17, 2025

At the Extra-Cold Café...


... you can talk about whatever you want.

"In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

"While we have previously upheld limits on the president's removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, 5 years ago, quoted in "Trump's firings of independent agency heads put 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent in crosshairs" (CBS News).
In what is likely to be the Trump administration's first Supreme Court emergency appeal of his second term, the solicitor general is expected to ask the high court to permit Dellinger's firing, according to documents obtained Sunday.

Dellinger = Hampton Dellinger, "who oversees the office that investigates whistleblower complaints"

The 90-year-old case =  Humphrey's Executor. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, called Humphrey's Executor "a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people," and said he "would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent."

(It's Humphrey's Executor because the man, who was fired by FDR, had died, and the family was suing for back pay.)

"Musk has said... 'Lil X is my emotional support human.' The idea that X was not a child, with the needs and routines of children, but a trained care worker..."

"... for a father with self-confessed 'stormy' emotional needs was no doubt a joke. However, [Musk biographer Walter] Isaacson wrote that almost as soon as X was born, to the singer Grimes, Musk considered him something special, and described how the baby had a medicating effect on his father. He 'had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence,' Isaacson wrote. 'He took X everywhere.' From infancy X accompanied Musk through a demanding work schedule, sitting on his lap at meetings, dancing on conference tables, attending film premieres.... Musk has repeatedly expressed how his lonely childhood instilled in him a desire that he 'never be alone.' His close working life with his four-year-old, or the person Isaacson describes as Musk’s 'cheerful energiser,' means that desire is met. Musk is a maths person, and perhaps having an awful lot of children is the equivalent of having one child but seeing an awful lot of them...."

From "Elon Musk takes his four-year-old son to work. Why? Musk has described ‘Lil X’ as his ‘cuteness prop’ — but his mother seems less delighted" (London Times),

"[T]his is like an amazing puzzle, uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization that went extinct … except it’s still around."

And what's going on here — mostly typos?!:

"My quest is to become the first person to cross Saudi Arabia north to south on foot, an expedition I’m completing in two parts..."

"It has really only just become possible for me to do this kind of trip, now that Saudi Arabia is opening up for tourism and welcoming non-Muslim tourists....  [A]t the border with Jordan... [w]e were planning to camp in the desert but when the farmer Abu Saqqar heard what we were doing he exclaimed, 'What God wills, what God wills, I must slaughter a sheep for you!'... This was my first taste of the Saudi hospitality that was such a delight on this journey. All the district notables were invited and we sat on the floor together to eat. I was the only woman so asked the men if they minded if I ate with them. They all politely invited me even though it may have been uncomfortable for them.... [T]he flat plains of pastel desert... were deeply soothing to the spirit.... The final stage will be a totally different experience as I head to the cool, misty mountains of the south, where the men wear flowers in their hair.... [T]he Saudis I have met on the way have been universally excited by the quest and desperate to show hospitality.... 'May God make you strong, may he bring you success, may you reach your goal if he wills it' are the words that will linger in my mind...."


ADDED: Here are some nice photos of those "Flower Men." The area is called the Asir province.

"Musk is trying to buy off Brad Schimel and take over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court so that Schimel can rubber-stamp an extreme agenda of banning abortion and cozying up to corporations."

"It’s not surprising that Schimel is groveling for the support of shady special interests — he’s already been caught begging on his knees for far-right donors to give him cash, and now Elon seems to be answering his pleas."

Said the spokesman for the Susan Crawford campaign, Derrick Honeyman, quoted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that says "Elon Musk-backed group Building America's Future purchased over $670,000 in TV ads supporting conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel." 

Elon is everywhere.

Citizen journalism.

Joe Rogan observes that "There's actually some things that are organic for some weird reason."

I'm listening to his podcast with Adam Curry (who invented podcasting). Scroll to 2:49:39 for this part, which comes after some discussion of the role of the CIA in the field of arts (Abstract Expressionism) and entertainment (the music of Laurel Canyon):
ROGAN: The real kooky people probably think you're my handler or something. Because you created podcasting. Because there's that thought that... there's a whole financed and backed right-wing ecosystem that's created these podcasts.... This is just stupidity. This is the problem where when you look at some conspiracies, you think, oh, well that applies to all things.... There's actually some things that are organic for some weird reason.
Notice that the use of "organic" is the same as we saw — in the first post of the day — from the Canada hockey coach. The fighting was, he claimed, "as organic as it gets."

"Part of me thinks that I will always be somewhat disappointed if what ends up becoming one of the most important relationships in my life is with another white person."

Says some unnamed man writing in to the NYT ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Headline: "As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?"

I haven't read to the end yet, but I've seen many hostile references to this column. Are they hostile to the letter-writer or to the ethicist? I don't know, but I became hostile to the letter writer when I got to the sentence quoted above. 

First, he's a man in bits and pieces: "Part of me... somewhat disappointed ... one of the most important..." I was so disgusted I had to restore myself by listening to "All or Nothing at All" by Frank Sinatra.

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

Assuming the Democratic Party needs someone to come in and remake it, as Trump did for the Republican Party, who could that person be?

I asked Grok, and it set out 4 "key attributes" : "1. Charisma and Media Savvy.... 2. Outsider Status or Unconventional Background.... 3. Clear, Bold Vision.... 4. Connection with the Base...."

Grok then came up with 5 individuals who might have the attributes, and I'll put this below the fold so you can guess before you look — guess, then laugh... or cry: 

"It would be disingenuous to my uh you know the way I like to act or my approach... It just happened.... It's nobody's business how I go about these things."

"It's within the law and... it might not be as interesting as people think or it could be a lot more interesting than people think."

Said Timothée Chalamet, responding to a question about how he ended up holding this one note for a long time when that's nothing Bob Dylan did when he sang that song. Presumably, Chalamet is channeling some deeper knowledge of how Bob might sing on some other occasion, never recorded, which seems like something Bob himself would do, and Timmy's channeling that too.

Here's his full "60 Minutes" interview:

 

It's within the law... I like that. You know, to live within the law you don't have to be honest.

"Flow."

I watched this on Max over the weekend and recommend it for the beauty of the visuals — I love the light and the water — and the wordlessness of the storytelling. 


There are various animals — cat, dog, secretary bird, lemur — but I was interested to see the capybara, because I'd just been reading this New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart, "How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s/It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago."

Looking back at that now, I see that Shteyngart discusses the movie "Flow":

"It wasn’t planned. That wasn’t two coaches throwing guys over and saying 'This is happening' — none of that happened. That was as organic as it gets."

Said Jon Cooper, the coach for Canada, quoted in The London Times:


Here's the video at YouTube. Judge for yourself. Political theater? Is this about Trump — Trump and his tariffs and his fifty-oneness?

Meanwhile, Trump himself was at The Daytona 500 and — with his lovely tiny little granddaughter — the sports-related masculine political theater was not brutishly macho but nobly patriarchal:


ADDED: The oversized MAGA hat emphasizes the tininess of the granddaughter, and it made me think of this image of Elon Musk in a giant hat: You can see the hat as it is — large — or you can perceive the optical illusion that Musk is a tiny person, a child. Musk famously tweeted: "I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man." And I've been thinking the love is a boy's love for the father he never had. Musk real father was — as Musk tells it — "a terrible human being" who has done "almost every evil thing you could possibly think of." The giant hat is a bid to be seen as a boy, to be loved by a father.

February 16, 2025

Sunrise — 7:00.

IMG_0767

Talk about anything you want in the comments.