As noted in the previous post, President Trump signed an executive order that "directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."
Now, maybe the zoo is thrown in there because it's run by the Smithsonian. But I had to wonder what the zoo might be doing and what it could do if it wanted to lean into the kind of ideology that the Trumpian vision sees as improper, divisive, and anti-American.
So I asked Grok to assume the job of infusing the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight. I told it to write some placards to be posted in front of particular animals and displays. If you're one of those people who won't read things written by A.I., you'd better bail out now, because what follows is 100% Grok:
"'I didn’t feel it, but I heard it. I thought: "Oh, shit. That’s my spine."' She believes that what saved her was that the ground was soft.... She remembers feeling the elephant’s short, bristly hair against her skin; the way it blocked out the sun as it went to roll over her again. She braced herself for the end, for her skull to be crushed...."
I like the elephant paintings, but part of what I'm liking is badness, and I feel liberated from knowing there's no delusional artist behind it... though I am a longtime fan of the subreddit r/delusionalartists.
But, of course, I want the human artist to win. I think! The author of the NY Magazine article, Megan Paetzhold, does win in this competition that she controlled against the AI in its current form:
"But at least based on present knowledge, an ant cannot possibly make such a showing. Happy is not a human, and an ant is not an elephant... [Happy] is extremely cognitively complex and comes from a highly social, empathetic species of wild animals.
Those qualities of elephants make them unique in the animal kingdom, meaning the answer to the question for earthworms, domesticated pets, service animals and many animals subject to medical research, would be entirely different."
A new company called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences recently announced plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths through genetic recombination with Asian elephants. Part of the rationale for this kooky experiment is to address climate change. Permafrost — frozen soil rich in organic carbon — is melting in the north, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and threatening to liberate up to twice as much carbon as is already present. Colossal says it wants to halt that process by unleashing beasts to uproot trees and stomp down grass to expose more permafrost to the cold Arctic air... Permafrost was once stable not because mammoths roamed the tundra, but because the climate was very cold and dry, which also allowed the animals to thrive, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics in the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The company’s plan has cause and effect reversed.
It's easy to laugh that one off... isn't it? But what's the next less laughable thing in the line of desperate proposals? And what if something that would work is mixed in and we're just skeptical about everything?
If you're inclined to be skeptical, you're probably taking the easiest route of all and just being skeptical about the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change itself. Who cares how much of scam the proposed solutions are if you don't even believe there's a problem?
Those who believe there's a problem feel desperate for a solution, and funding solutions is political activity that appeals to those who feel desperate. That's worrisome to those of us who just want the very best and most accurate science and technology.
"... within several years.... Some researchers suggest that wooly mammoths helped transformed the now-mossy tundra into a fertilized grassland; if the Frankenstein version were able to achieve this feat again, the tundra could serve as a buffer against erosion and a potential carbon-dioxide sink to combat global warming.... 'Is it humane to produce an animal whose biology we know so little about? Who gets to decide whether they can be set loose, potentially to change the ecosystems of tundras in profound ways?'... 'You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time... Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?'"
While humans carry out social distancing, a group of 14 elephants broke into a village in Yunan province, looking for corn and other food. They ended up drinking 30kg of corn wine and got so drunk that they fell asleep in a nearby tea garden. 😂 pic.twitter.com/ykTCCLLCJu
— Corono she better don’t (@Spilling_The_T) March 18, 2020
woke up to a text from my mom about how a wild elephant went into a Sri Lankan hotel and gently wandered around while poking stuff with his trunk pic.twitter.com/C2biQT8C30
“We believe that the elephants were trying to help the baby,” [said the director of Khao Yai National Park in Thailand]. “They are forest animals that live in a group, and when one member is facing problems or needs help, they will come to help.... We believe that the death of all these elephants happened at the same time because they wanted to save the little one.”...
Edwin Wiek, founder of Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, said he hoped that the herd was larger than the 13 known members and that the two elephants that survived, a mother and a calf, were not all alone. “Only two survivors out of a herd of 13 is so sad for the two survivors,” he said.
I had to look at my texts to see what mine would be, and it was wonderfully absurd:
Althouse 2020
elephants in the garden
IN THE COMMENTS: No one asked me why I'd texted "elephants in the garden." It was my reply to Meade, when he texted me an untitled video from our garden:
Knowing the plant is called "elephant ears," I texted back my idea of a title.
Nderiki and her husband had been married 65 years before he was killed by an elephant in 2014. Like nearly everyone else in this cluster of villages, it has been years since her fields weren’t trampled and eaten up by what she calls “the giants.” She used to grow more than 100 bags of sorghum in a season. Last harvest, she salvaged three.
Four other poachers... described how an angry elephant surprised them as they stalked endangered rhino and stamped their friend to death giving them a chance to run for safety.
Kruger Park Rangers... found what was left of the poacher on Thursday but it appeared he had been eaten by a lion pride....
KNP managing executive Glenn Phillips said: “It was very sad to see the daughters of the deceased man mourning the loss of their father, and worse still, only being able to recover very little of his remains.”
What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White Hat" (NYT). The NYT says a few nice things, deep in the article:
Mrs. Trump has seemed at ease... She has posed for photos with babies and children, often murmuring the same things at each stop — “Beautiful!” and “Hi, guys!” — while holding their hands or waving at the cameras.... On Friday, she looked happy as she visited a red clay feeding pen for orphaned elephants at the Nairobi National Park. She administered them formula in oversized baby bottles, patted the animals on their heads and inspected their floppy ears.
We're told she wore a white shirt and that the shirt did not get dirty as she fed the baby elephants.
In the iconography of the Western, the good guys wore white hats... It’s possible Mrs. Trump is not aware of this.... Except she has something of a history of using white suits to send what seem like fairly pointed messages; see her decision to wear white — associated with women’s rights in the form of the suffragist movement, as well as Hillary Clinton — to her husband’s first State of the Union address, which happened to be her first high-profile appearance with him after the Stormy Daniels scandal broke....
Whatever. We know Melania's most famous fashion message: "I really don’t care. Do U?"
AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):
I spent 5 minutes looking at the details of that photograph — which is by Damon Winter — and thinking and talking about it with Meade. I still haven't read anything more than the words you see there, the caption — "Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a thirty minute drive into town for coffee and a scone, at his favorite coffee shop in Athens" — and the byline — "Glouster, Ohio" (so the Athens is Athens, Ohio not Athens, Georgia). I really haven't read anything more, even now, as I write this. I just love the image. I feel like saying — creative-writing-ishly — there, now, you make up the story.
I can't get over how much I love that image. I love the way the curve of the ground makes the house look like it's on its own little planet. I think of:
Searching for that image, which I knew I'd put up on the blog before, I found the 2010 post, "Obama plan to land on asteroid may be unrealistic for 2025." I had totally forgotten about that going-to-an-asteroid business, hadn't you? I was skeptical at the time. I wrote the sentence: "Go 5 million miles to paddle your gloved hands across the surface of a rock and stir up a cloud of razor-sharp dust particles that will — once you leave — hang there endlessly."
Searching the blog for the Little Prince, I also came up with this November 2017 post (which has a "Little Prince" image): "Trump and the elephants — what just happened?" ("So you've probably heard that Trump made an announcement that had to do with killing elephants, people got upset — because people love elephants — and then Trump took it back — kind of.") Coincidentally, Trump and the elephants is back in the news this week. "Trump’s cave to elephant and lion hunters" is deplored by the editors of the Chicago Tribune:
Some African governments allow [elephants] to be taken by trophy hunters.... Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to discourage this macabre pastime by outlawing imports of elephant trophies from specified countries. African elephants are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, and the law says their body parts may be brought in only if “the killing of the trophy animal will enhance the survival of the species.”
I think those words "Under President Barack Obama" bring tears to some eyes. There was a time! Once our quills were made to temporarily lie flat, but that time is gone.
But speaking of temps perdu, we left Erik Hagerman, walking down his ranch-house asteroid, nearing the bottom of the paved drive, which ends abruptly, like the end of a dreamlike Obama presidency. He must continue onto the rougher way of the gravel road. Where is he going? To the endless coffee cup and the scone.... Dare I step off the image I've said I love and walk onto the gravel path of the article?
Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. To make sure he doesn’t overhear idle chatter, he often listens to white noise through his headphones. (He used to listen to music, “but stray conversation can creep in between songs.”)
Why? Why drive 30 minutes to get coffee if you don't want the company of other human beings? Surely, the whole point is to "overhear idle chatter"! But he plays "white noise" — nothingness. Not even music, because with music, there are spaces of silence, and "stray conversation can creep in between the songs." Why come down from your asteroid? It can't be the triple-shot latte with whole milk. Is it to truly experience loneliness, to see and need to defend against the others? To really feel your distance, you must approach.
At Donkey Coffee, everyone knows his order, and they know about The Blockade. “Our baristas know where he’s at so they don’t engage him on topics that would make him uncomfortable,” said Angie Pyle, the coffee shop’s co-owner.
I'd skipped to the middle of the article, looking for coffee, and now I need to puzzle out Hagerman's problem:
Mr. Hagerman has also trained his friends. A close friend from his Nike days, Parinaz Vahabzadeh, didn’t think he was quite serious at first and, in the early days of The Blockade, kept dropping little hints about politics.
The new administration compelled her to engage more deeply in politics, not less. She had only recently become a United States citizen, and she was passionate about the immigration debate. She did not let Mr. Hagerman opt out easily. “I was needling him,” she said.
Ah! He built a wall — The Blockade. I will build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me... I will build a great, great wall...
How to write about articles you've never read.... makes me think about how to make art about the stray chatter you overheard in the coffee shop...
But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?
The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.
You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.
And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.
When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.
But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.
That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:
In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....
In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."
An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.
I see that even Scott Adams — who revels in explaining why whatever Trump does is some genius "master persuader" move — thought Trump blundered ridiculously. Even though (if?) Trump's plan made good sense at the real-world factual level, it was horrible messaging at the emotional level, which is what matters in politics, and he shouldn't have done it. In that view, Trump's quick turnaround was a correction, abandoning rational policy to realign with emotional politics.
But let's undertake the thought experiment: What if it was a good idea to temporarily waft the idea of ending the ban on importing elephant trophies? I've been toying with a few thoughts on the subject.
No elephants actually died. The idea was out there and then squelched, just something to think about. What most people seemed to think about was how great elephants are. We love elephants. They're just about the favorite animal on earth. I mean, what's the competition? Dogs? Giraffes? Human beings? Pandas? We just got all balled up in our warm, enthusiastic love for the gigantic beasts with the big ears and the long trunks.
It's an almost childlike response. Didn't you draw elephants when you were a child? Every drawing of Noah's Ark has an elephant. We've been trying to draw elephants for a long time:
An elephant is the first thing the author tries to draw in "The Little Prince":
We have many soft buttons about elephants. The first thing I saw this morning on Facebook was an old photograph of a little girl sitting on a stool next to an elephant. The elephant is also seated (I guess because getting elephants to sit down was a standard circus trick imposed on captive elephants), and the girl has her arm as far as she can get it around the elephant. The elephant doesn't have its arm around the little girl because elephants don't have arms, and it's unlikely that the elephant loves the little girl. But we see love, because the love is in our heart.
But did you know that just in India, 100 to 300 human beings are killed by elephants every year? I'm reading that at the World Wildlife Fund website:
Elephant-human conflict poses a grave threat to their [that is, the elephants'] continued existence.... When elephants and humans interact, there is conflict from crop raiding, injuries and deaths to humans caused by elephants, and elephants being killed by humans for reasons other than ivory and habitat degradation. Elephants cause damage amounting from a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars. Every year, 100 humans (in some years it may be 300 people) and 40-50 elephants are killed during crop raiding in India....
We have no wild elephants in America, and I notice the "Pleistocene re-wilding" plan (blogged here in 2005) didn't get too far. We don't have elephants trampling cropland and little girls in Nebraska. For us, elephants are like unicorns. They live in Imaginationland. If Trump kills them, he kills out dreams.
Do you think he didn't know that? I'm going to suggest that he knew he could make elephants fill our brain. They are huge, not just in real life, but in our mind. You won't be able to ignore the elephant in the room that is your head space, and Trump put him there. The question is what were you not thinking about when you were thinking about the elephant? It's the most perfect distraction ever. It was so distracting that you didn't even notice what was that thing about Trump that we'd have been harping on if it weren't for the SAVE THE ELEPHANT!!! I think it was Roy Moore molested children, therefore Trump should be impeached.
Yes, we were thinking about big unruly penises, but a human penis looks like nothing compared to the elephant's trunk. Look at that thing! It's huge! It's prehensile!
By the way, "trunk" sounds like "Trump." And elephants "trumpet." Don't you hear them in your head now? Trump and elephants begin to merge in that deep part of your psyche that makes no sense. Suddenly, you love Trump. You were loving elephants, and Trump is saving the elephants now. All is good, the arc of elephant-saving bends toward justice.
... an elephant that in real life might like to trample you to death, but an elephant that exists in your mind as the lovable creature that Trump saved.
Said Jude Sparks, age 10, interviewed by the NYT about the stegomastodon fossil he tripped over when he was 9.
Jude said that he went through a phase — between the ages of 5 and 8, to be exact — when dinosaurs and fossils excited him.... “I’m not really an expert, but I know a lot about it, I guess,” he said...
If you don't like going to the NYT, here's the story at Fox News, with a different interview with young Mr. Sparks:
“I tripped on the bottom of the tusk and fell flat on my face... It looked like large chunks of bone.”
“We’re dealing with chronic stress and chronic trauma in our community,” said Jerome Dillard, director of re-entry services for Focused Interruption and state director of EXPO, Ex-Prisoners Organizing. “We need to get boots on the ground to get the outreach we need to get these lives on track. Many of our young people don’t see themselves as being part of America.”...
“We do have a plan,” Deputy Mayor Gloria Reyes said, noting that the mayor’s 11-member rapid response team of city, Dane County and nonprofit representatives that has been shaping the initiatives will continue to meet regularly.... “It’s unfortunate we have community members and leaders who refuse to look at the bigger picture... It became about the Boys & Girls Club. It became about who was going to get funded and not get funded. It’s very unfortunate.”
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