A Sociological Eye

  The last institutional barrier between us and the presidential narcissist who would be emperor is falling. It’s going to be up to us to stand up. Here’s your overview: the federal government has three branches that are supposed to serve as checks and balances to ensure the U.S. never has a king. Congress is supposed to make the laws, the president enforce them, and the courts rule on the constitutionality and legality of the actions of the first two branches. Our current self-worshipping president and his awful clown car of minions have decided that they get to make the laws, and can use them to stomp on all of their declared enemies. Whatever existing laws they don't like, they ignore. Who's going to stop them? Well, Congress is supposed to do that. But the Republicans who hold the slim majority either worship their Great Leader, or imagine they are slyly using him, or are terrified that if they don't bend to his every whim, his followers--their voters--will descend on t...

  This is Stonehenge. You're probably familiar with it! I've seen documentaries about it all my life. It's a henge--one of many circular structures built of stone, wood, and earth found in Northwestern Europe, especially in the British Isles. They were built by the ancient societies of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages for ceremonial purposes, and people love to debate what those were. All we really know is that the sun rises over the Heel Stone on the summer solstice and sets over it on the winter solstice, as you see here:   Actually, you never get that peaceful view today, because the place is always crammed with visitors and worshippers on the solstices: About those worshippers--many of them are neo-Druids. Now, the reality is that Stonehenge was built a couple thousand years before there's any evidence of Druids existing--they didn't emerge until the Iron Age. While it's true that the Britons of the Druidic era were preliterate, so of course they left n...

    Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't. That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony! Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots. AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Ch...

Let's see where we went in the space of a week! Last Sunday, Elon Musk fumed on X about his xAI chatbot, Grok, treating the BBC and The Atlantic as reputable information sources. Musk declared it "embarrassing" and wrong for the AI to trust such media. On Tuesday, as the first white South Africans were arriving in the US as refugees, Musk was posting on X about terrible "white genocide" taking place in South Africa. People asked Grok to fact-check this claim that genocide was being committed against the white Afrikaners who had imposed apartheid. Grok debunked the claim as untrue, and this got a lot of attention on social media and in the news. Then on Wednesday, Grok suddenly stopped giving many people sensible answers to questions they asked it, and suddenly started relating everything to an assertion that there was a genocide being perpetrated against white people in South Africa. People asking about dog memes, about baseball stats, about video games, abo...

  There is something so terribly ironic about the Trump administration attacking universities for a supposed lack of "viewpoint diversity," at the same time it attacks them for pursuing DEI-- diversity , equity, and inclusion.   Tell me again--is diversity supposed to be required, or banned? In any case, the reality is that universities are packed with viewpoint diversity! The hallways are full of discussion and debate, and competing theories are studied day in and day out. What do they mean there's no viewpoint diversity? Oh, they mean that 98.5% of the professors at medical schools advocate for routine childhood vaccination, and 97% of the professors in climatology say that global warming is happening, humans are causing that change, and we must do something about that. Meanwhile, only 12% of MAGA voters believe the government should be acting to counter global warming, and only 36% of Republicans today believe that children should be required to get routine childhood v...

  Ah, nature. Everyone loves it!   Here on the left, we want to protect nature from human-caused climate change and pollution. The right counters, "Our scientists say there is no climate change!" Well, ok, but 99.5% of scientists agree that climate change due to our production of greenhouse gasses is indeed happening. Those are some really. . . unusual scientists you're citing.    The redhat right has its own claim about needing to protect nature. They cry that people on the left are violating the laws of the nature of sex! Nature dictates and the nation requires a sex binary of men and women who are eager to marry and produce children, they say. But instead, the left is full of gender transitions and queer people and crazy cat ladies, leaving the real men of America bereft of the loving, attractive wives they deserve!    Here's the thing. You can cause harm to natural beings and settings. You can kill off the vast herds of buffalo that once roamed the plai...

      This is the view from Wisconsin. Those are the presidential approval ratings that came out of the latest Marquette poll of Wisconsin voters. It's the most polarized result ever seen. As one of the 98% of Wisconsinites on the left who disapprove of what has happened since the second inauguration of Trump, all I see resulting is evil. A constant stream of lies and misinformation; the appointment of a loud swarm of self-promoting, hate-stirring incompetents; the spitting on our allies; the useless, destructive tariffs; the firing of thousands of American heroes, leaving agencies we all rely on for our safety scarred and staggering; the attacks on teachers and researchers and clinics and parks that are vital to a functioning society; the censorship of terms and destruction of data; the fostering of bigotry and promotion of discrimination. And all of this destruction done in order to enrich billionaires and feed shocking narcissism. How could anyone approve of that? yo...

  There’s a fantasy out there. And it’s being used to justify a flood of actions that are stupid, counterproductive, meanspirited—oh, and often illegal. Actions like firing FBI agents, prosecutors, and inspectors general who protect Americans. “Throwing into the woodchipper” entire federal agencies doing vital work—like USAID (which saves the lives of starving children and those suffering from dangerous diseases in other countries), or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which saves Americans from being ripped off by credit card companies and banks). Shutting down a wide range of grants to charities that help people in need or assess the impacts of discrimination. Slashing the funding of research—and through that action, yanking back hundreds of millions of dollars from universities and hospitals that rely on that funding. Firing people from across all federal agencies randomly, based on their not having served the full two years or one year of probationary status, with n...