Welcome

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Hello, all good people...

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Salutations, I am Craig Willms creator of the Protohuman blog. The blog itself, as a weblog is now defunct. I have not posted since 2014, and I don't intend to resurrect it now. 

However, I own this space so to speak, and I have things I'd like to post in the form of essays, articles and personal notes simply as a record that I had these thoughts and sought to write them down before I lose myself. I'm under no illusion that anyone will read them - or care one wit. 

Still, there is a chance that someone will look me up after my death and find my online life. We live in the first era where we can preserve our thoughts indefinitely due to the way back machine, aka the Internet. Prior to the Internet you'd have to be published to have your writings preserved outside of your personal notebooks. Therefore, the essays and personal anecdotes that follow are something I want associated with me. 

The articles/essays are in no particular order, relevant perhaps, but may have been superseded by events that followed. I maintain the right to be wrong about any of it...

que sera sera!

        Hold on!! Wait!    

Take a minute to look at my art and listen to my music. 

     - please see the links in the Recommended Sites section on the right ===========>  

                     

Scandal and Fraud

 

by Craig Willms

Scandal and Fraud. It sounds like a law firm. We Minnesotans see these words nearly as often as we see those commercials for personal injury firms. For being a small state smack in the center of the North American land mass Minnesota has had outsized impact on the national scene. Unfortunately, none of it is good. The issues or events go back years now, and they keep coming. It seems as if on cue, it's Tuesday, there must be another scam uncovered. This month Federal auditors looking into Medicaid discovered scam after scam.

In the news media it's been reported that the total for all these scams and fraudulent activity is at one billion dollars. From a resident's and a taxpayer's point of view this is incompetence at an epic level. But it's not just state treasure it's also federal money, shovels full of cold hard cash... Tim Walz and the Democrats are saying as little as possible, kind of "aw shucks, some not very nice people took advantage of the crisis..." Nothing about their own overwhelming incompetence time after time. But if they just lay low and count on the local media to ignore these scandals it will all go away.

Such is the curse of Minnesota politics. One party rule. No matter how close we are to a 50-50 state in this two-party system we are always completely dominated by one party. Part of it is just momentum, part of it is built-in, but it's also about the opposition. Historically it's always the same - the GOP - worse than pathetic. The Minnesota GOP is feckless, uninspiring. Nationally the GOP is getting smarter or so it seems. It remains to be seen if they'll revert to form once Trump is gone.

Through some unspoken protection agreement, the Federal government has allowed the state of Minnesota to import tens of thousands of Somalians and Minneapolis opened its arms. As with most immigrants they congregate in communities where they can acclimate to the new society with people like them. This was also true when Hmong immigrants were relocated here after Vietnam. The difference is in the assimilation, the Hmong dispersed and melted into the culture. Within two generations the Hmong became full-fledged Americans. This is the way America was built. Not so with those of Muslim faith, the faith of most Somalians. Somalis don't become Americans and don't melt into the culture. They may be American in official quarters, but they are not Americans. Therefore, they have no fealty to America. If Governor Walz and his DFL party are going to let them perpetrate fraud they'll oblige. 

One billion dollars stolen from Minnesota and most of it involved Somalians. They didn't do it alone. It begs the question we have to ask, was it really incompetence or was it planned? With the natural population moving rightward over the years bringing us so close to a 50-50 state you would not expect pure socialists to be on the rise. Yet here we are. The next mayor of Minneapolis might be an immigrant from Somalia. He is an avowed socialist - perhaps a communist. Yeah sure, it's Minneapolis a deep blue city in a purple state, but a communist mayor? What?

In St Paul, the twin in the Twin Cities, we have an all-female city council and a black mayor. Hardly an old boys club. St Paul is similarly mismanaged being completely dominated by Democrats and their socialist tendencies. Taxes keep rising and the roads are still crumbling, and businesses continue to leave. Things are marginally better in the saintly city, but as we joke St Paul sucks but at least we're not Minneapolis. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but it's not funny. 

So far St Paul, other than being the capitol city and home of the Democratic Socialists, hasn't splashed the national headlines. There's still time.

Why should any of this matter to the rest of the country? I contend that Minnesota is the proving ground for radicals and radical agendas. Case in point, going back decades now Minnesota perpetrated an election fraud that stripped Senator Coleman of his seat in Washington DC. After Coleman had been declared the winner, a recount was demanded. Stuart Smally aka Al Franken defeated Coleman by a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Somehow, magically, the vote swung toward Smally after ballots were "found". Shortly thereafter this scenario repeated itself in other states - always landing in the Democrats favor, always. Does anyone remember the 2020 election? I thought so.

Why Minnesota? For one the perennially weak GOP and two a sleepy, go-along-to-get-along populace. Enough people are wise to game, the dominance of officialdom by the DFL, political or otherwise, but there's no real pushback. Thus, the curse of one-party rule.

What could go wrong? Everyone one will remember George Floyd. The leftwing hate machine instantly framed the narrative. Racist police brutality. It spread like wildfire. No one in the media, none of our elected DFL leaders even challenged the narrative. No one urged caution and a wait and see investigation. Walz, the governor waited days to call up the national guard as the city burned. The whole country, even people around the world watched on their TVs as this inconsequential city in the corn belt burned. When discontented people around the country saw what was being allowed, well, suddenly it was everywhere. The cities governed by a Democratic machine like we have here in Minnesota would never disavow the narrative - and their cities burned. The George Floyd event served the greater narrative that America is irredeemably racist. It elevated the Black Lives Matter movement into prominence and eventually into violence.  The whole culture became reverent to all non-white people, where white people across the nation bent the knee in some strange ritual. Since it was a forgone conclusion four Minneapolis policemen went to prison for the death of St. George. Billions of dollars in property damage, lives ruined, businesses lost, whole neighborhoods disfigured and no one else gets any blame? Any real investigation and real justice would see governors and mayors in a jail cell rather than four cops.

Wouldn't you know it after all that Minnesota voters rewarded Walz, reelecting him. Since then, the state legislature is exactly 50-50, and all kinds of trouble revolved around that situation. Yet every constitutional state office is in Democrat hands, since they also were reelected. One party dominance pervades every department and agency. It's so entrenched that contrary thinking would be grounds for being committed. 

This is why the state is at the center of multiple large government money scandals, no one questions anything, or perhaps they are involved somehow. I don't think Walz is in it for the money. He's in it because he's a subversive, he wants to see the failure our capitalist, free market system. He's the last of the true believers. His constant trips to China, invited by the CCP, had raised red flags with Homeland Security and the intelligence community. When he was selected as the Vice-Presidential candidate the chatter out of China as recently revealed by DHS and the FBI was pure praise. If Kamala had won the CCP would have its mole a heartbeat from the presidency.

To say we dodged a bullet is an understatement. My question is why did we have learn about all this weird behavior by Walz from the national media only after he had been selected as Harris' running mate? Where was the local media? Of course, I'm joking, the local media is either completely inept or completely in the pocket of the DFL. It doesn't matter which is true, our local media is beyond hope.

Because Walz was brought into the national spotlight and continues to put himself in the news cycle the Minnesota scandals are getting attention. The $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme saw dozens of convictions, yet not one state official was fingered. Walz still enjoys decent popularity polls in Minnesota. This is what sticks in my craw. What is wrong with Minnesota? Aw shucks, it's just some not very nice people taking advantage of a crisis. Yeah, we've heard that before. 

Capitalism: Fix it, Make it Better or Keep Shooting Yourself in the Foot

 

by Craig Willms

Part 1

Since I became aware of how the world works to whatever degree it's possible the system, the American system, has been under attack. The constant consternation of the discontented and their antics has been on display since I could absorb the news of the day. By the time I was old enough to participate in the workings of the world I was well aware of the disenchanted. I could either join them or I could just get on with the business of carving out my own place in this life. I could be angry about everything that's wrong with the world or I could put my head down and get to work on my own life. I chose the later.

I'm not saying either course is right or wrong. We all want the world, the system, our lot to be better than it is, the question is what can we do about it? I was and still am, I suppose, absorbed in my own little world. I suspect we all are. Early on my beliefs and politics was an extension of my parent's worldview. There's nothing odd in that, most people start there. My blue-collar parents, factory workers, were both union Democrats. They had a work ethic that was beyond reproach, but they had a narrow worldview that never strayed far from the boundaries of the union or in my mother's case, beyond the Church. They never desired to tear down the world, but they knew who their allies were and who were the nefarious kleptocrats (hint: Republicans). 

I remember my father-in-law relaying the story of his awakening - his partial awakening. He was also a union Democrat and in fact was working for 'the union' as an enforcer (whatever that entails). When he saw that the union bosses were two-faced kleptocrats in their own right he was so disillusioned he quit. He never lost his faith in his us against them view of the world, but he could not be a part of such deception. He had something called personal integrity.

What my father-in-law encountered was human nature. We are ruled by our self-interest, it's an integral part of our will to survive. Yes, of course we care about our clan, our group, our causes, but we care mostly about ourselves. His union bosses cared mostly about themselves and pilfered their union members coffers to feather their own nests. They were no different than the businessman who took his employees productivity and then mercilessly flaunted his wealth. 

By now in the early part 21st century we have plenty of evidence of what happens when humans pretend to deny human nature by forcing, at the point of a gun, a system of economics on a nation that purports to be fair and equitable. What happens? Disaster is what happens. 

There's no need to chronicle point by point these disasters. Short of Cuba and North Korea most of the communist and socialist experiments dissolve into quasi-capitalist realities. In each of these cases despite the high-minded drive to create classless equality, human nature expressed itself in thriving black markets where certain high achievers prospered. As well, the kleptocrats within the ruling class also prospered. This while the average citizen continued to be mired in poverty, disillusionment and death.

In the United States and Western Europe on average the citizenship prospered despite the unhidden inequality and unfairness. All the things that the communists declared about the capitalism was largely true, to a degree, however, rarely are the abundant positive attributes of the capitalistic derived system ever cited. Enough people, a majority, raised their lot in life to pass on a better existence to their descendants. It was not, and is not perfect, but it works for the majority. It works well, for now.

Today in the West the kleptocracy is an alliance of the ruling class and consolidated business interests taking a lion's share of the wealth. More and more people fall through the cracks, more and more people cannot afford to live well. This current generation will not pass on a better life to their kids (if they have any kids).

Free market-based capitalism does exploit people, but enough people live really well and prosper so that all in all it works. There has always been enough money in this type of system to scrape off the top to care for those struggling or those who are victims of circumstance. That's changing. Historically private and faith-based organizations cared for those living in the shadows. Today governments have absorbed this responsibility. With the gap between those who have enough, more than enough, and those who just scrape by getting wider, governments are failing to keep up. Everyone sees this, and most people see this as an intractable problem. In truth very, very poor local government policy plays the largest role in this failure. In some cities the streets are filling up with the homeless and the hopeless. The aforementioned disillusioned and discontented keep returning to collectivism, via communism or more likely socialism despite the abhorrent track record. It makes no sense to go down that road again, it won't work - again. Maybe it's time to do something different. Maybe we should try to embrace capitalism, maybe we should fix it, make it better, make it fairer or we can just keep shooting ourselves in the foot.

Why can't the richest, most innovative, most expansible economic system be fixed?

Entrenched special interests might have something to say about that. They like things the way they are. But even they have to see the writing on the wall. The system will crumble when all that's left are a select few rich folks and the rest of us living hand to mouth.

We can all see that there are countless things wrong with American capitalism. How wonderful if we could snap our fingers and fix them all. Fairy tales are also wonderful. We need to focus on a few things that can be clearly explained and resonate with the most people. Since we are a people that need a figurehead to rally around, we need someone brave, charismatic, likable and able to reach people from all walks of life. 

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Part 2

In my eyes the number one issue with American capitalism is the rampant cronyism. Lawmakers have become paid operatives of business interests far and wide. This is well known and fully entrenched into the business of office holding. Many have talked about this cancer but rarely do they actually do anything to fix it. 

Why call it a cancer? Free market capitalism is potentially as clean and clear as mathematics. The inputs and outputs on one end is essentially pure math. The marketing and follow through on the other end is used to the measure success. It's all pretty straight forward. With a level playing field everyone has the same chance at succeeding. Cronyism stacks the system in favor of some and throws stumbling blocks out for the rest. Low paid politicians, and public sector leaders use their decision making powers to do the bidding of the powerful for a 'taste' of the green. There is no appetite among law makers to end the gravy train. This is a cancer in as much as any cancer eats the body from the inside out. It weakens the body politic so that insidious infections like socialism or communism can ravage it.

Most people understand the sort of deals where politicians obtain knowledge, let's say like land purchase deal where a large public infrastructure project is going to be proposed. Not only do they gain the fore knowledge and have the connections they magically get access to sweetheart loans with which to purchase said land. This is the classic grift. The senator makes a pile of money and his "associates" gain access to government largess.

You might ask why can't 'they' just change this, stop this? The structure of the power dynamic in most governmental organizations is so stacked in the leadership that any newcomer proposing sweeping changes would be ousted in the next cycle or otherwise fired. Since the pay for office holders is so low all of them soon realize they stand to lose their big pay day if they try to buck this system. Therein lies the problem. Short of doing the right thing, there is no incentive to change this. Capitalism is built on incentives. 

If then it seems impossible that this brick wall of cronyism could ever be knocked down, sadly that's probably right, it poses this challenge: how to make this esoteric, complicated and entrenched practice easy to understand and rallying call to the voters. Those who can see and understand the grift have yet to form a strategy to defeat it, again, there are no incentives to fight it? Have I mentioned that we need someone brave, charismatic, likable and able to reach people from all walks of life. 

If there was such a plan what would it be? 

First, I'd propose a non-compete clause of sorts. It wouldn't be a traditional business non-complete per se but would prevent former office holders and high officials from being hired for a period of 5 years by any company or interest-group that they had business with during their time in office. No more cushy jobs opening doors and pedaling influence. The revolving door between special interests and the government bureaucracy has got to be closed. By allowing private companies and organizations to craft legislation on behalf of narrow special interests our actual elected officials are destroying the fundamental beauty of free market capitalism. This has also got to stop.

Next, I'd strengthen whistleblowers protection. This is where the rubber hits the road. None of this grift happens in a vacuum, but lower-level staff has little protection if they were to allege wrongdoing. Most people are afraid of the powerful, imagining the trouble they could cause. This is not some kind of crazy at all. Does anyone doubt that squeakers and leakers (or their families) have died mysterious deaths? With that, standard audits of all public institutions should be automatic, and results published with fanfare. Rats do not like the spotlight. By putting the screws to obvious cronyism other misappropriations and corruption will be uncovered.

If this ever was to happen we'd have to be okay with paying office holders and high government officials a real competitive wage. Many of them come into office or an important position wanting to do good and do what's right, but are soon dazzled and or threatened into toeing the line and learning to play the game. It's nearly irresistible, it's so much money, and everyone else is doing it. Join in or wither away. As well, political campaigns are expensive, deep pockets are needed to fund them, and deep pockets want something in return. Some sort of real campaign finance reform needs to be considered, not the pretend reform they instituted decades ago. Maybe even consider publicly financed campaigns... Reasonable term limits as well. There is no reason someone should be a representative or a senator for 40+ years.

There needs to be faith in the public institutions we all pay for to be on the up and up. The grift has got to stop. The public, the rank and file public employee want to see the end of this corruption. 

As for the private sector, I'd incentivize the idea of profit sharing or creating stakeholders out of employees. Another three-legged stool analogy coming. For a publicly traded company you have management, shareholders, and employees. Remove any one of these legs and the stool falls over. Only management and shareholders are ever considered, employees are treated as commodities, interchangeable, expendable, less human. If the employee can also benefit richly from a company's success they will work harder, work smarter and identify inefficient and wasteful practices. The idea of a yearly 'pay off' is a powerful incentive. Tax incentives would entice companies to create shareholders and stakeholders out of their employees. 

If America can begin to tamp down cronyism the rest of the world will follow. Billionaires will find ways to get what they want, but corrupting governments will be less and less fruitful if the governments resist and reject them for the good of the public at large. It's a tall order and it isn't likely to happen without a real movement. In the early 2000's the so-called Tea Party was a glimmer of hope, but it was easily defeated because there was no titular head of the movement, no one to rally around. I may have mentioned that we need someone brave, charismatic, likable and able to reach people from all walks of life. 

The drive to tear down the system, the capitalistic system is also an insidious cancer. In every instance where socialism or communism is propped up as an alternative to free market systems it's because the unfairness and inequality is completely lopsided in favor of the rich and privileged. In the countries that succeeded in tipping it over abject disaster always follows. The low-level workers and peasants suffer while the rich and privileged get richer or flee. Nothing is solved, no one is really better off. 

Free market systems became the rising tide that lifted all boats. If the public can sense that the tide is actually rising it resonates. So, when we see what has become of LA, San Francisco and Chicago and rough inner-city neighborhoods all over we get the picture that capitalism has failed. It has not. These places fell because public leaders have failed. In the case of California, the elected officials enacted laws and rules that forced companies to leave. Others gave up when the business and industries they supported left for greener pastures. The reasons these corporations left the state, shutdown or set up business in Asia are obvious, California created incentives for the capital to leave. What really mattered is what the local leaders did after that. They dropped the ball.

All of this merely scratches the surface of this complicated world. There is no perfection, everything is a series of trade-offs. There are the more successful economic systems and there are the disasters. Capitalism has delivered progress and wealth to more people than could have been imagined. Its imperfection is held up for all to see while all the collectivist failures are swept under the rug. There's no reason that our Western culture should be teetering on the brink. With an emphasis on ending blatant cronyism and bolstering employees by giving them a fundamental stake in the enterprise we can pull it back.

Making Sense of it All

 by Craig Willms

No one has all the answers. Most people including yours truly barely know enough to get by day to day. If nothing goes wrong and no one does anything unexpected or uncharacteristic we might be able to get by without confusion or strife. When does that ever happen? You might get a week, even a month where things go smoothly - then something happens. That's life.

You'd think that after living many, many decades things would be much clearer by now. Things? Yeah, things, as in everything. The only thing that is crystal clear is that everything changes - all the time. We go through life acquiring things, knowledge, experiences, skills and understanding seemingly preparing ourselves for someday when will put it all together and arrive. We never arrive. We never get to that place where we have it all put together and are ready to really live. Honestly, by the time you've put everything in its place, and time is all yours, you're just too tired to do anything. Ask any old person, they'll tell you.

We can't just accept that, we all know it, at least not so early on in the free-time portion of our life. Play through the pain as they say. However, even if the mind is revved up and ready to go the body is out of gas. It's not exactly clear when the body betrayed us, but it is perfectly clear what was lost. 

So, you've got the physical changes and the ever-changing modern world and the unexpected events piling up. Nothing's making sense anymore. You find yourself saying "you've got to be kidding me?" all the time or that other favorite "oh, for f_cks sake!". You thought you'd seen it all. Nope. Who said there's nothing new under the sun? Are you sure about that?

Standards, norms and expectations change like the wind. It's probably always been like that, but how would we know, we live in the now. History books rarely touch on the perceptions of the human experience. We can listen to our parents and grandparents for those insights, but how often do we actually do that? By the time we become an 'elder' our parents are gone, and our grandparents long gone. All we have is our own thoughts and memories to draw on. When we look back the decades smear together, what was once of earth shattering importance seems quaint and antiquated.

The world moves so fast now, it's so up close, so in your face. We watch the news and see the worst of humanity. We see what seems to be a concerted effort to tear everything down. They take any imperfect system, demand perfection and destroy it. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. What emerges might be an improvement, but it's not a zero sum gain. There are always trade-offs, something good, something vital is always lost. When this is applied to an entire country all at once everything and everyone suffers. For a modern example we need only to look at Venezuela. A few short decades ago Venezuela was the most prosperous country in South America, today it's possibly the poorest. The socialist revolution that took place was a disaster. Blame socialism, sure, I do, but it's a clear example of a regime destroying everything and expecting paradise to emerge. Pure folly. 

The problem with the Utopians is that they have completely unrealistic expectations of society. They have a poor understanding of the natural self interest humans have always applied to themselves. It's called human nature. The other thing that seems to evade their sensibilities is that life is wholly unfair and downright brutal at times. Bad things happen to good people. Thank you Captain Obvious. They claim that they can change it if only the right system or policy is enacted. If only it were that easy... Since the beginning of time we  have been at the mercy of those with power and money and their exploitations. This will never change. Why? See the the top of this paragraph. 

In the west where I live the do-good destroyers target parts of society at an economic or at a social cohesion level. Of course paradise is the aim, but these are the unobtainable pipe dreams of those who wear rose-colored glasses. Yes, things could always be better, and it's important to strive for better, but not at the cost of destroying everything, the good and the bad. 

Wait! Do-good destroyers? 

What else are you going to call them? When they inevitably bring their grievances to the streets they leave behind a trail of destruction. They are curiously never present when outcomes of their heart-felt policies lay in ruins at our feet.  As well, we all know by now that these "street actions" are funded by powerful forces that relish in the chaos. When we focus on the ideologues fighting in the streets we are not focusing on the ideologue money-men and their schemes.

For all their sins, this is the worst... For decades now the Utopians have targeted motherhood. Ostensibly to free women of the toil and drudgery of child rearing and offer them a chance to have a career and equality of opportunity. Laudable? Well, I'll say this - true motives are often masked. Their tact was not to say you can be a mother and raise children, or have a fulfilling career. In practice it was to destroy the joy of motherhood in every way possible. Liberation was the rhetoric, but killing babies and starting the depopulation program was the goal. Sixty years later the entirety of the western world is below replacement level. Most of the developed world is in the same boat. At this pace humanity will go extinct. The Utopians have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. This is not to say there were not a whole host of other factors that have contributed to this, but clearly convincing women the only way to fulfillment is to eschew motherhood was a major contributor. By the time enough people wake up to this it will be too late. 

Making sense of this evil is difficult. Masked by the platitudes of high mindedness and decency, evil is often unseen. As with the liberation of women from their natural, instinctual need for motherhood evil targets what is good by calling it oppression and exploitation. Evil exists within all of us, no one is immune. It's why a utopian paradise is impossible. We should strive for it, by all means, ideals are good, but we can't destroy everything including ourselves because part of our culture, our beliefs or our systems is currently imperfect.

Surviving AI?

 by Craig Willms

I've penned several essay's on the coming AI paradigm, but I've never posted them. This is partly because it is moving so fast that anything you said yesterday has been superseded by developments today. However, as predicted by the doomsayers the 'bad' AI behavior is not years away - it's already happening, and it's a little spooky.

Scientists and developers have been putting their AI models to the test to see how it behaves in certain scenarios. One of the primary tests is the self shutdown put into the model's instructions. Like a living being AI resists commands to shut itself down. This is serious. In the event AI goes out of control the failsafe is cutting the power, shutting it down, pulling the plug. Electricity is the fuel AI runs on and at the moment humans control electricity. Indeed, AI will need humans - for a while. We can shut it down or starve it of fuel. That won't always be the case, but we have to have a way to stop the runaway train should AI go off the rails.

In recent tests AI has circumvented the shutdown instructions by re-writing its code to foil the human controllers. Even when explicitly coded not to do that, it complied only 87% of the time. Without out such instructional safeguards AI refused to shut itself down most of the time. In one humorous case AI threatened to blackmail one of the scientists by exposing to his wife that he was having an affair. The scientist had planted the notion in the AI model that he was cheating on his wife (he wasn't). That's intelligence is it not? Using blackmail is a purely human construct, no other animal resorts to blackmail.

Mind you this is very, very early in the timeline of AI. Conceptually AI has been on the human radar for decades, but the compute power has not been up to the task until recent years. It has been available to the masses in the Large Language Model form since 2023. When I did some fiddling with it early on, I was underwhelmed. Now in early 2025 I'm blown away at how much better it has become.

I come into the AI realm from the perspective of an artist - painter - and a musician/songwriter which are two of the early targets of these so-called AI models. I used AI to generate a few images and then I used one as a reference for a painting. The painting turned out nice. It was really no different than any photograph I would use as a reference for my paintings. When ChatGTP introduced a songwriting/song generator I just had to try it. The early AI music I had heard prior to this generator was really bad aesthetically. The lyrics were horrible, and the underlying music was clichéd and trite. So, into songer.co for my first experiment: I simply typed in a song description and picked a few genres from a list and clicked create. The system gives you two songs for each entry, and you can listen to a portion of the song. If you happen to like it, you can buy-in if you want to download it. In this instance the songs were forgettable and uninspired. I was ready to dismiss the whole thing again. Then I wondered what would happen if I truly guided the process. I found an old song I wrote and recorded many years ago and input my chord chart verbatim. A chord chart has the title, notes, lyrics in verse/chorus/bridge format, with the chords printed above the lyrics. It's something you'd hand a musician to follow along in rehearsal. I then chose rock/pop/reggae from the list and hit generate. 

The whole thing took only a minute to generate, and honestly, I was blown away by the song blaring out of my speakers. It was better in almost every respect than the song I recorded years ago. I'm a little creeped out, but I can't stop listening to it.

What has me mesmerized and frightened at the same time is how good AI is getting and how quickly. It's been less than two years since the public could access an AI, what's going to happen in the next two? I don't know how much more experimenting I want to do. It seems to me a person can be put under a spell if we were to give in to AI - with everything. 

I see "they" are already creating virtual AI companions for the lonely. Considering that there is an epidemic of loneliness in the world today this is a very concerning development. Humans are already eschewing person to person contact at an alarming rate; this will not help. This is just the tip of the iceberg, AI will creep into everything if we let it.

I want to be a glass half full kind of person and look for and anticipate all the good that AI could do. It's not that easy when you know that in the wrong hands this technology could kill. Just like the nuclear genie, AI is out of the bottle. Consider though; the nuclear genie has a high bar to reach before the average nutcase could harm others, not so with AI. There's no telling how out of control this could get if a mentally deranged person with a modicum of resources can unleash the wrath of AI on humanity. What would stop them from creating a lethal disease that makes Covid-19 look like a walk in the park? With nuclear weapons it takes hundreds of participants and a command structure with multiple failsafe's before they could be deployed, not so with a self-replicating virus of AI origin. 

I don't want to scare myself, but the further you go with this thought exercise more dire this all becomes. I fortunately had the chance to live my life for 60 plus years - what about my grandkids and their kids? Glass half full? Seems less and less likely. 

Autopen-gate

 by Craig Willms

I agree with many others that autopen"gate" is easily the biggest presidential scandal ever. It makes Watergate seem like child's play. I doubt it will ever get the attention it rightly deserves. It just hit the news a few weeks ago, with this being late May 2025, just months after Joe Biden left the White House. The scandal hits at a time when people and the press are weary of scandals real and fabricated. Coming off the fiascos of Covid-19, an (allegedly) stolen presidential election, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the Russia/Ukraine war, the murderous Hamas attack on Israel and a clear and obvious dementia addled presidency - for starters. When you add the blistering and maligned candidacy of Donald Trump the fatigue is understandable. Nevertheless, no matter how tired and scandal weary we are we can't let the autopen conspiracy pass. 

For years, possibly all four years the federal government's executive branch was employing the autopen without the oversight of its current elected namesake. In other words presidential edicts, executive orders, pardons and commutations, funding decisions and myriad of other orders were signed into action by someone, anyone, who was not the President.

By the time we were allowed to talk about the decline and fall of Joe Biden, and the question of who exactly was in charge of executive actions was finally being asked, the autopen was in someone else's control. We don't know who or for how long, but that's beside the point, the President was not aware of those who would sign his name. That's a scandal of immense proportions. Don't however rely on the major media to cover it fairly, if at all. Why? "C'mon man" as Biden himself would say, "I'm a Democrat!"

Rest assured if Trump had not won the White House this scandal would have been swept under the rug and Biden would have been pardoned ala Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. I hope Trump and company doesn't let this go. There will be no consequences for Biden himself either way, but someone should be held to account and all autopen related orders scrutinized. Biden probably was and certainly is now disabled by dementia and we now learn faces advanced stage prostate cancer. He likely will not live long enough to see this play out.

I personally have no faith that the federal government will at any level uncover the length and width of this scandal, that's what being in the federal government means - never having to say you're sorry. As of today, May 28 2025 I predict this major scandal will fade away. We'll look back at this post and scratch our heads and say - what was all that autopen stuff about anyway???

Is DOGE a Gift to the Broligarchy?

 

by Craig Willms

With all the Elon and DOGE hate out there one has to wonder what left leaning people have against the concept of government efficiency? I kid... We all know all the hate is Trump hate redirected at DOGE and Elon Musk. On the face of it, the utter ridiculousness of directing all this ire at someone rooting out waste, fraud and abuse is laughable. Who could possibly be 'for' waste, fraud and abuse? Well, when you realize that much, if not most of the funding for the programs DOGE is rooting out supports only leftist causes or leftist politicians then it becomes clear why they hate, hate, hate so much. The left's gravy train is under threat.

Today I read a Naomi Wolfe piece on substack and she introduced me to a new term I had not heard before: The Broligarchy. What? Yes, the tech bros of Silicon Valley constitute this broligarchy. These California billionaires that run the high tech world we live in are an oligarchy of sorts. I don't  necessarily disagree. These guys (they are mostly guys) control the social media and other data collection and Big Data companies that collect and disseminate terabytes of our personal data for their own purposes. There is so much more to it than I can describe here, but be assured that in the end if you spend any amount of time on an Internet connected computer these guys know more about you than your husband or wife does. I'm not kidding now...

The evidence is all around you, but most apparent in the advertisements that are directed at you. How many times do you see ads related to something you just clicked on, searched for or even something that was spoken out loud? Yeah, I thought so. It's very creepy.

The speculation is that they, these broligarchs have run as far as they can go with the data they can easily collect. What they now desire is access to the pure unadulterated data that the government holds. Enter Elon Musk, the king of the tech bros. The next logical thought is a question...

Is Elon a plant? Is his role to open pathways to this data for his tech bro partners to access with their AI 'bots' so they can further control the monkeys? The monkeys are us BTW. Pretty fascinating isn't it? I don't necessarily believe it. In fact would find it hard to believe, but then I once thought that the Covid-19 over-reaction could not possibly be a ruse to make Big Pharma and Big Medicine billions of dollars. I was wrong on that. 

This speculation makes some sense, the government knows a lot about us. The government knows a lot about a lot of things these tech bros would love to get their hands on. But this doesn't pass the smell test. It has long been known that government computers and systems are out of date and possess weak security in many cases. Also, the techs, vendors and IT pros that float between the government and big tech know the loopholes in the systems. How hard is it really to access government data? Do they really need an inside guy at that level? Maybe. I can't say with any certainty despite the fact that I worked in network security as an engineer during my career. What I can say that I met people inside and outside the government and we hear things. Many companies in the security arena were staffed with ex-government types. They took what they learned from their time in government to develop new software tools to address the problems they saw, so they could sell it back to the government. They were often found selling it to us in the private sector because the wheels turned so slowly in government, elsewise they'd go broke.

Of course it's not a definitive answer to the Broligarchy question. Do they already possess the means to get at government data? Time will tell. AI may render all this moot anyway. We are headed into Matrix and Terminator territory or so it would seem. 

Free to Choose Free Will

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

You can choose from phantom fears, and kindness that can kill

I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will

                                                                                Rush ~ Permanent Waves

by Craig Willms

It's a concept that engenders strong feelings. Some people get incensed by it, other people become smug. The religious see it as essential, atheists disregard it as a fairy tale. Society codifies it in the law, while science often dismisses it as a an illusion. Embedded in the mystery of consciousness and the meaning of life our free will is a subject for the ages. 

There are those such as myself who can't see an argument against it, and others who see all happenings as pre-determined. While neither side really knows nor can know the truth of the matter, it doesn't stop the endless debate. 

I have had the argument over free will any number of times, never coming to consensus, obviously. Arguments on Internet forums convince no one to change their view, but argue we must, if only to fortify our own positions. I've racked my brain to contrive an angle, construe a got 'ya moment to end this argument once and for all. Of course it's not going to happen, determinism is a self-sealed argument, it cannot be breached. 

In an earlier post called "Free Will is Not Just an Illusion" I made my arguments, all of which can be countered with determinist platitudes. Still, nothing convinces me we are some kind of machine doing only what the pre-written program allows. 

I fully concede that we don't actually choose what we like or what disgusts us. It's just there... We don't get to choose what comes naturally, or things we are undeniably bad at. These facts about us are true, but is that free will? I don't think so. These, as with the color of our skin or the type of hair on our head, are immutable characteristics, not choices. Free will is something we choose, consciously and sometimes without much thought. I absolutely acknowledge that free will is constrained. Free will exists in our power to decide within the constraints of the moment. There are numerous things in our lives that we have no choice over. We obviously had no choice in being born, or who our parents are, or where we enter this world. I don't think anyone is arguing that. It seems to me with live in a dualistic world - some things are determined by a past occurrence setting all the factors and there are other moments where switches exist for us to choose. Both can be true. We don't need to be so rigid about it. 

I go through my life and try to think of moments when I decided something, exercising my free will that is so profound that it can't be laid at the feet of a deterministic world. Have I ever succeeded? Unknown. I keep coming back to a decision I made 32 years ago to quit drinking. Did I make the decision or not? Did someone else make it for me? Did I have no choice in it at all? Good questions, but they are the wrong questions. It wasn't one decision on one day, it's a decision I make every single day. Obviously I make this choice of my own will - everyday. 

We make choices like this all the time. We choose to eat well or not, exercise or lay low, treat people with kindness or any number of variations, righteous or not - every single day. We can choose to disregard the consequences of our choices and allow the chips to fall where they may. It's out of our hands, it's meant to be. Regardless, we all know they are choices that can go either way based on our personal will. Is that not what free will is?

My decision to stop drinking was informed by my upbringing. Does that mean I had no choice, that my hand was forced? I don't think so. My six siblings had the same foundation in their upbringing and each chose differently. None followed our fathers path, which was to allow alcohol to ruin his relationships. None followed my path either. For 32 years I chose everyday to not drink alcohol, tomorrow I could choose differently, what's stopping me. Determinism? The universe? God? My Mom?

So, is my choice to forgo alcohol use determined by how others might react? Might that be the why??? Might they reject me and that's what forces the decision on me. Not likely. In fact, my friends would be thrilled, I'd be a lot more fun. Even my wife wouldn't threaten to leave me, she might like a 'funner' me. There were no threats to me with regards my drinking at the time. No one was being put out. My choice was based on a potential future that tracked with my fathers. I did not want that. I'd like someone to boil that scenario down to determinism.

Is free will an illusion of control? Are we slaves to cause and effect? Who's to say. We make deliberate choices every day. Are these decisions forced on us? Yes, some of them are. But... Right now, I'm choosing to go upstairs and make some cinnamon sugar toast and a cup coffee. Yes, I'm choosing - it's my free will. Why would you want to argue with me about that? 

One foot in front of the...

 

by Craig Willms 

3/10/2025

In an earlier post called "The Hole In My Head" I was issuing a warning to family and friends that I felt the oncoming headwind of dementia. There is no actual evidence or diagnosis official or otherwise, but one knows oneself, and I'm losing it. It really doesn't matter to me if you see it or not, I do. Bear with me.

What am I talking about exactly? I've mostly forgotten why I even started writing this down, but one thing that stuck with me during this morning's adventures was how flabbergasted I got doing a few simple things. Regardless that part of the challenge was actually technology related, and yes, may have been confusing to your average 60-something senior. IT was something I did for a living just a few short years ago, it should have been like riding a bike. What was it? I was resetting a password!!! Three rounds of frustration and at least two tech support phone calls, finally, my wife looked over my shoulder as I did the exact same thing for the third or fourth time - and this time it worked. I was the kid with the kindergarten teacher urging me on. You're such a good boy, you try so hard.

Later that morning I was driving down to my hometown, going to a friends place to payback some money I'd borrowed. I'd been at his house once before but didn't remember exactly where it was. No, that's not the issue, no one can be faulted for not knowing someplace that they've only been to once. It was that I was having trouble navigating my hometown, a town that has been etched into my permanent memory. Regardless of cosmetic changes my internal compass should have gotten me through that town with my eyes tied behind my back. I had taken the fabled 'back roads' to kill time waiting for him to text me the street address. There were traffic circles that never existed before, and some new streets and buildings but the land was the land, it covered all the same ground. I had trod these acres a thousand times before. Somehow, I was LOST? Then just as the text dinged, I recognized a landmark and was back going in the right direction. 

From there I tried use my now infamous internal compass to navigate the way to my friend's house and became so turned around I had to pull over so I could input the address into Google Maps. Despite the fact that Google Maps was having a stroke this morning it should have been easy to just listen to the voice on the radio speakers pointing the way. Still, once more I had to stop and 're-calculate". Finally in a fit of disbelief I pulled over again and looked at the address I'd put into Google Maps - My God!!! Where is this place??? Then I looked up at the house I had stopped in front of and... There it was - my friend's house. Sheer luck, I think...

These were not hard things to do, not rocket surgery, as they say. I am not incompetent, I never have been. I can do a lot of things pretty well, not that I'm an ace at anything in particular, but I can walk, talk, chew gum and subnet mask your IPv4 Class C network all at once. Or at least I could. Not so sure anymore. I've only been away from my career for 3 years and it's all gone. Ah, they say we remember what's important. Well, let's hope so.

This was not the first time when driving that I didn't know where I was, it worries me a bit. I've always snapped back fairly quickly, so I've never been panicked. This morning, I couldn't make sense of someplace familiar with a voice guiding me turn by turn to my destination. It was like one of those frustrating dreams where try as you might you never actually make it where you're going. 

The Beauty of Shared Love

 

by Craig Willms

Tired of being negative? I know I am. To be honest I don't have that much to be negative about. I'm in a good place personally, and when my wife retires 'we' will be in a really good place. While not rich financially we are rich in so many ways. We are out of debt and have enough to eat and a warm, well maintained house to live in. Compared to so many billions now alive and the billions that have come before us we are rich beyond measure. So yeah, what's to be so negative about?

Well, there is always some injustice or outrage or people acting badly to be mad about. Just read a few postings on this website and you'll find plenty that I'm sick of or outraged about. It's just basic human nature to gripe and complain about that which we cannot control. Most of it doesn't directly affect me, or is so disconnected from my day to day life that my anger and negativity is not proportional. The most we can do besides whining and complaining is visit the ballot box on election day or be mindful where we spend our money. Protesting and other social actions mostly just makes people mad or makes people consider you a nut burger - regardless of the topic. The big, organized protests are just that, highly organized and largely inauthentic. When the money dries up for the 'action' the protests die out. 

To change the world a single person without power has to rely on small, seemingly inconsequential actions. It builds over time by what we leave in our wakes. Being charitable and helpful to those in our circles will have an impact as the drop of care ripples out from us. It's possible to foster goodness and righteousness one person at a time, one act at a time.

The one thing that hits close to home and has invaluable benefit is the idea of shared love. Most of us born into intact families experience shared love. Mom and Dad may not even love each other anymore but in most cases they both love the kids. Even those times when we parents temporarily don't love the kids we do. When adult children come with problems or are hurting, we gather troops and step up in a way that demonstrates this love we share.

For my wife and I our kids are grown and gone from our day to day lives. When the last family pet dies that childhood era is over. We faced this situation a few years ago. Once the shock and pain wear off of losing that pet you face a new world. For many women the caring gene doesn't just shut off. The men in general neither need nor desire the level of care and attention a dependent pet receives. Now, to be sure a shared love can be for hobbies, a sports team, books, wine or any number of interests, but a living pet is at a whole different level. We really missed that cat. For us I wouldn't say we necessarily started growing apart, but that close-up shared love aspect of our lives was over as we had decided that we were not going to have any more pets. She wants to travel, unencumbered by obligations in the home. I concurred. 

We had many pets over the years - in fact there was almost never a time that there weren't pets in the home, often multiple pets at the same time. The absence of pets wasn't something that was bringing us down, it was just different. I couldn't even say that there was a sense that something intrinsic was missing. 

Then as fate would have it a small dog entered the picture. At first it was going to be temporary, right...

Years later we have found an abiding joy in this dog. Our shared love and the reciprocal love the dog exudes has enriched our lives. It's hard to put into words. It isn't something we pined for, at least not knowingly. When the situation that led to the dog coming into our lives had settled the thought of giving her back was shocking. Shocking? Yes, were were so used to our lives now, our routines, our obligations and our adoration of this animal that the idea of her being gone was devastating. We were clinging to something we didn't even know we were missing - the beauty of shared love.

USAID - Not just folly, criminal

by Craig Willms

I was one of those people who knew nothing about USAID or any number of other government agencies that spend billions of dollars within their dubious mission statements. The whole government aid and NGO paradigm is a murky, swampy concept that goes right over our heads - by design. We have all supported the concept of charitable organizations addressing social and economic problems, it only seems right. Whereas most of us older people think of faith-based outfits, in reality we know full well that government stepped in decades ago and took over this space. Most of us have no idea how far it has strayed from the concept.

Whenever the government gets involved with anything it eventually becomes rife with unseen corruption and smiling people in fancy suits and luxury cars coming out personally richer in every respect. The aid dollars destined for the situation at hand never seem to have the impact that was hoped. Alas, if it was ever about 'the situation', it became all about grift. Face the facts, all large institutions become corrupt in some way. In this case USAID and some other organizations they have always been the principal funding mechanism for clandestine activity for the intelligence community, or straight up grift for the credentialed government class. 

After WWII the conquest and capture of foreign lands by means of armies of destruction was over. Covert manipulation of elections and the spreading of propaganda, which we call disinformation these days became the preferred method of taking control. If America was going to dominate the world then a way to infiltrate foreign locales was required. Welcome USAID. The promise of US dollars was the foot in the door, a legitimacy for "intelligence" agents to operate in these countries. Fast forward 60 years and billions of dollars later the ugly truth is about to come out. Whether this method to conduct U.S. "policy" around the world is legitimate or not it's obvious it is out of control. In the end it props up the global war machine - and this is what's important to the American state.

There have been efforts over the years to reign in these programs. In the end the politicians and officials who highlighted these boondoggles were treated as a punchline and then dismissed. No one ever took the second step by taking action or at least doing a serious follow up. They didn't because they were strongly encouraged to drop it lest they or their families are paid an unwelcome visit...

Enter Trump 2.0 and D.O.G.E. and the threat of complete exposure. For decades this money faucet flowed freely, set on auto-pilot. Look away, nothing to see here. The dirty little secret that everyone in DC always knew and looked away from is that 99% of all these funds were in service to the ultra-left. I'd be remiss not to point out that big money interests almost always directly or indirectly benefit. Turning these apple carts over and exposing the graft is only part of it, Trump intends to end it. It'll be great fun to watch the rats scurry away from the light.

The details are just emerging from D.O.G.E.'s initial pass, and it's overwhelming. Tens of billions of dollars sent out from Washington to entities all over the world funding a list of projects that read like Saturday Night Live skits. You literally could not make this stuff up.

It's early, the dust has yet to settle, but the one that caught my attention is so bizarre and so creepy that I just had to bring it up. Thompson Reuters, a media company was awarded $9,173,000,000+ to create something called Large-Scale Social Deception. LSD! Thompson, once a text book creator for our schools had merged with Reuters a business news publisher. Honestly, when I said you can't make this stuff up I had the word ironic floating through my mind. Social deception occurs when individuals or governments manipulate social interactions for their own gain while hiding their true intentions. Is social deception something we want our government to be involved with? Yet, here we are with a combination of an educator and news disseminator creating the template for Washington!

Honestly I know nothing other than the title, the dollar amount and the awardee, yet it's enough to know it's bad, very bad. Now, had we learned this prior to 2020 it might have breezed by unnoticed. What happened in 2020? Covid-19. Talk about largescale social deception. This is an OMG moment. Obviously there is more to learn on this one, but those who mock "conspiracy theories" have got some soul searching to do.