3/32025

 Sunday, March 30, 2025

D+144/70

1965 Vietnam War: A car bomb exploded in front of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, killing 22 and wounding 183 others

1972 North Vietnam launched a major conventional offensive against South Vietnad

1981 President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinckley

2018 Palestinians began a "Great March of Return", 6 weeks of protests on the Gaza Strip demanding Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to Israel. 19 Palestinians were killed and 1,416 injured on the first day.

2023 Former President Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan Grand Jury on charges over hush payments paid to porn star Stormy Daniels

2023 Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak signed an open letter warning that the race to develop AI systems is out of control and asking for a suspension of at least six months

In bed around 9, awake at 3:18, and up at 3:33.  39°, haze, rainy, high of 48°.

Prednisone, day 344; 3 mg., day 3/21; Kevzara, day 12/14; CGM, day 12/15; Trulicity, day 3/7.  2 mg. of prednisone at 4:30  a.m. and   p.m.  Other meds at 8 a.m.

Am I growing more alive the closer I get to death?  Something has been happening to me the older and more decrepit I get.  I am becoming more aware of how much beauty there is all around me.  I am becoming ever more aware of how much I treasure Geri's presence in my life and I use the word 'treasure' advisedly.  I almost write that she is my reason for living, as indeed she is, since I can't imagine going on in life without her by my side, sharing my days and nights.  But to say that she is my sole reason for living denigrates what else I'm thinking which is that I've become much more aware and appreciative of everything around me, from the clouds in the sky to the houses and other buildings I see as I drive, to the farm fields outside the urban area, to the millions of trees reaching up from the earth to the sky.  I'm starting again to see the child in other people I encounter.  I first had this kind of insight one night in Dublin when Sarah and I went there for a long weekend in mid-December using our Irishfest tickets on Aer Lingus.  As luck would have it, Sarah came down with a nasty case of bronchitis on our holiday, but we enjoyed the visit as best we could.  In the middle of one night, while she was finally enjoying some restful sleep and I was awake, I looked at her face and saw the little girl whose eyebrows I would rub as I sang her to sleep at night - "Is this the little girl I carried?  Is this the little boy at play?"  She was a grown woman, self-sufficient, self-supporting, self-confident, and very accomplished and we were in a foreign land on a holiday that she had planned and put together.  But as I looked on her face that night I saw the child she had been and from whom grew this wonderful grown-up person.  I've started to have this kind of experience more lately, seeing persons not only as who and what they are now, at this very passing moment, but as a person who was once a child, needing love, nurturing, and support as she encountered all the forces that life would visit upon her up until this moment.  This kind of vision comes easiest with our own children, of course, because we've known them throughout their infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.  But each of us, every one of us, started our journey as a child, needing love, nourishing, and support and shaped by how those needs were satisfied (or not), and by all the forces that life has visited upon us.  I can't address here the question of how much we shape our own lives by our own agency, 'free will' if you will.  I leave that to Robert Sapolsky and the philosophers and theologians.  I note here though, that I believe life becomes easier if we remember that each of us started out as a child, and that child lives in each of us, still.

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

    My appreciation of trees is not something new in my old age, but it has deepened with age.  The fact that there are millions of them doesn't lessen the enjoyment I experience looking at them, any more than the fact that there are milllions of birds doesn't diminish my delight in watching them.  The trees and the birds all seem like some kind of miracle to me.  How is it that they exist, that they are so beautiful, so hardy, so adapted to their environment?  I know Darwin's answer - natural selection and evolution - and I'm in no position to take issue with it, but still I marvel at them, each tree, each sparrow, each squirrel and mouse, each minnow and guppy.

    And those old homes and other buildings in Milwaukee and the older suburbs.  The old stores on Third Street and Water Street.  The homes on Grand Avenue in Port Washington.  The warehouses in the Third Ward.  The churches near our former home in the Knickerbocker: Immanuel Presbyterian, All Saints Cathedral, St. Paul's with its Tiffany windows, Summerfield Methodist -so many structures with their own histories and the histories of so many people who prayed in them for so many things over so many years.  So many baptisms, weddings, funerals, Sunday services, etc.  I have loved that neighborhood since I delivered Milwaukee Sentinels to stores and bus stops there the winter of my senior year at Marquette, 62 years ago.  I still love it. 

    Am I just getting overly sentimental in my old age?  Does this happen to everyone, or most old geezers?  Nosalgia?  Or is this a grace, an undeserved blessing?  In any case, I am grateful for it.  It makes it easier to bear with the burdens of old age, of which there are as Damon Runyon might say, more than somewhat.

Some anniversary thoughts:  First, on Artificial Intelligence, here's some of what Elon Musk had to say about AI just 2 years ago today:

AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1] and acknowledged by top AI labs.[2] As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now. 

 . . . 

In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.

Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an “AI summer” in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society.[5]  We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall. 

Quaere how many of the recommended actions have occurred under the Biden regime?  Under Trump's?

Second, the prosecution of Trump for the Stormy Daniels' hush money was a mistake.  It contributed significantly to the feeling among his supporters that Trump was being persecuted, not prosecuted.  It was legally 'iffy' from the get-go, as was NY AG' Letitia James's case against him for overvaluing his properties and defrauding the State of New York and various banks and insurers.