Doggy fun

 

Just a dog having the best day of its life. pic.twitter.com/mYKZrXCnOJ

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 20, 2026

When you call your dog… Without calling him. pic.twitter.com/iHvt7YkTjo

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 18, 2026

Buddism, Summarized

Here's some useful AI: Buddhist Precepts

The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching. They are called “noble” because they are truths understood by those who have awakened to reality.

1. The Truth of Suffering (Dukkha)

Life involves dukkha, often translated as suffering, dissatisfaction, stress, or unease.

This includes:

• Physical pain

• Illness and aging

• Death

• Separation from what we love

• Getting what we do not want

• The feeling that even pleasant things do not fully satisfy us because they change

The Buddha was not saying that life is only suffering, but that ordinary life is marked by instability and dissatisfaction.

2. The Truth of the Cause of Suffering

The cause of dukkha is craving (tanha) and attachment.

We cling to:

• Pleasure

• Possessions

• Ideas and opinions

• Identity (“me” and “mine”)

• The wish for things to stay the same

Because everything changes, clinging leads to frustration and suffering.

3. The Truth of the End of Suffering

Suffering can cease.

When craving and attachment are let go, the mind becomes free. This state is called Nirvana (Nibbana)—peace, freedom, and the end of compulsive grasping.

4. The Truth of the Path Leading to the End of Suffering

The way to liberation is the Noble Eightfold Path:

• Right View

• Right Intention

• Right Speech

• Right Action

• Right Livelihood

• Right Effort

• Right Mindfulness

• Right Concentration

These are usually grouped into:

• Wisdom (understanding reality)

• Ethical conduct (how we live)

• Mental cultivation (mindfulness and meditation)

In one sentence

The Four Noble Truths say: there is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can end, and there is a path that leads to its end.

This was the core message of the Buddha’s first sermon after his awakening.

 

We make our tools; our tools make us

The title to this could have come from Marshall McCluhan, a man fascinated by tools that he calls "media," and their influence on civilization. 

One example McCluhan cites: When Gutenberg began printing Bibles, this meant the Roman Catholic hierarchy no longer could monopolize access to the sacred text of the Bible. Vernacular transations followed and were printed, and that ensured there would (later) be a reformation (and a counter-reformation) re-making the structure of authority in Europe. This ultimately led to the downfall of feudalism, the enlightenment, and influenced the founding ideas leading to the USA. The same phenomenon also led to the counter-reformation, the Inquisition, and many wars. So...a mixed blessing.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari says AI has hacked the "glue" of civilization (trust) Computers can now undermine the authority of bureaucracies of politicians, lawyers and bankers. Dangerous!

 

Ultimately, the destinations of machine learning depend on existing learning, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that existing learning is imperfect. One TED talk describes the ways we make bad decisions.  

There is even evidence that the algorithms that govern our physical existence, making sure we can digest food, walk upright, etc. are subject to "bugs" - flaws that have managed to avoid the elimination assured by evolution. See "Super-Normal Stimuli" for examples that include both humans and animals. 

One example: refined sugar evades the messages our digestion sends with other kinds of food to let us know we've consumed enough. You can suck on a "Big Gulp" sugary drink all day, and you'll never feel full. The epidemic of obesity we currently experience is one of the products of a bug in a digestive algorithm. 

Other bugs include the seven deadly sins (pride, wrath, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust) and the apparently infinite appetite for safety, if not justice. Calling "sin" a software bug describes why it's to be avoided. The wages of sin are death. Bugs often crash the computers running the bad code.

So AI may also exploit humanity's buggy software even though "Why AI Doesn’t Think, Cannot Reason, Isn’t Intelligent and Will Never Achieve Consciousness" is a thing. “When God wants to drive a person insane, he grants that person’s every wish.” (Paulo Coelho). 

Meanwhile: Dave Dayen reports "It's becoming the case that it costs more for a business to deploy AI and fire human workers than it does to keep the human workers around. That could be an economic death knell for the whole technology. "

Still some pretty useful items from AI. For example: AI Detects Hidden Warning Signs Before Major Earthquakes (SciTech Daily) 

An introduction to the positive side of machine learning (AI) describes how, after mastering games, from simple to Chess and Go, AI now does medical research, correlating things like protein production to DNA/RNA structures, and creating proteins that fit with the ones discovered like this. The lecturer says such discoveries would take PhD students literally years, while computers can do the calculation in hours, if not minutes. The speaker is humble, and willing to admit computers need guardrails, but the benefits appear real.

 

AI is at least a mixed blessing. 

Meanwhile, the attack on the poor continues (The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty). Current economic priorities discount the idea that NI (natural intelligence) could beat AI, and suppress the diversity of opinions and points of view. Sure, Newton spent hours on alchemy, and even more on theology, so humans can, like AI, "hallucinate." But we got modern physics from Newton (and, Planck, Bohr, Shroedinger, Einstein, etc.).

How Empires End

‼️ The truth of the situation is becoming shockingly clear to more and more people in Washington.

But the dilemma remains: withdraw and relinquish West Asia to the Iran / Russia / China bloc, or continue to fight and relinquish the entire empire. https://t.co/iR0CveiMy6

— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) July 20, 2026

 

Not Really News: Poverty is being criminalized

From a recent report:

The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty

Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the “criminalization of poverty.”

In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance.

This form of criminalizing poverty — racial profiling or the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access public assistance — is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life possible.

In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we examine are:

• The targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors, and the resurgence of debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of people unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees;
• mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once they have served their sentences;
• excessive punishment of poor children that creates a “school-to-prison pipeline”;
• increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping in public when no shelter is available; and
• confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through “civil asset forfeiture.”

US vs. Chinese public policy

The US: 

Matt Stoller explains the history of why US public policy has been twisted to serve the billionaires here. Excerpt: "Someone with great foresight killed the left’s ability to govern, a long time ago....

"Gingrich was an intellectual, as were some of his colleagues. When he first was elected in 1978 as part of what was known as the “New Right,” every young Republican candidate was obsessively reading Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox. In 1995, his goal wasn’t just to pass legislation, but to fundamentally re-gear Congress so it could no longer serve as the brains for the Democratic Party, as it had for the last half century. That was an institutional task, and he set about restructuring the institutions.

"First to go was the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan think tank that conducted long-term studies on important scientific and engineering topics, like how to decommission the Space Shuttle or early warnings on climate change. Gingrich also slashed Congressional staff by a third, eliminated dozens of subcommittees, and killed budgets for the legislative service organizations that helped specific groups of members, like the Black Caucus, the Caucus on Women’s Issues, the Environment and Energy Study Conference, and so forth. Most importantly, the Democratic Study Group, a network of staff and members who organized the rhythm of the House, disappeared.

"And Gingrich bulled the Congressional Budget Office, which was set up to rival the executive branch’s capacity to govern. “It’s our intention to largely replace CBO [sic] with more moderate economists,” Gingrich spokesperson Tony Blankley said. Other institutions, like the Congressional Research Service, got the message. Fall in line."

China: 

Meanwhile, Arnaud Bertrand reviews Xi Jinping's book explaining China's philosophy of governing here.

Excerpt: "[Xi's analysis says] the biggest problems with Western modernization are that it is capital-centered rather than people-centered and that it seeks to maximize capital gains rather than serve the interests of the people."

Bertrand quotes Xi contradicting those who insist China's success originated with its imitation of capitalists' policies: "Following the founding of the PRC, our Party continued to lead the people in carrying out socialist revolution—dismantling the feudal system that had persisted for thousands of years and establishing socialism as the country's basic system. This transformation represented the most comprehensive and profound social change in Chinese history, and laid the political and institutional foundations for China's drive for modernization. During this period, China lagged so far behind much of the rest of the world that even basic household items like kerosene, matches and nails had to be imported from other countries." 

 ===

Both essays are well worth reading in full. They clarify the dynamics and history of the differences between China and the US. 

The limits of capitalism

"We often hear about Capitalism's contraditions, but I think the most tragic one is that we teach children pro-social behaviors: to share, to be kind, to cooperate, and to work together. We try to raise them to be decent human beings. But then, when they grow up, they are rewarded for outcompeting others, being cutthroat and ruthless in the workplace, and if they achieve wealth and power, they are often rewarded for many anti-social behaviors." - David Graeber