Why are some believers consulting chatbots in preference to asking their own clergy members or reading the Bible? My hypothesis is that AI is a natural fit for them. It fills the same niche in their lives as their belief in God: to people who’ve been taught not to think for themselves and to rely on outside guidance for every major decision, AI gives them that, without the inconvenience and friction of attending church. It’s always there, always listens, takes their most trivial concerns seriously, heaps praise upon them and tells them they’re right no matter what. It’s a true deus ex machina that does everything they’ve ever really wanted from God.

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Naively, you might have expected that churchgoing Christians would be less likely to use or trust AI. After all, these believers have been taught to trust the Bible as the only source of truth and their church as its supreme interpreter. It seems like they should be suspicious of any source of information that isn’t deeply rooted in their own faith tradition, let alone a new and enigmatic intelligence concocted by Silicon Valley.

But this expectation is wrong. In fact, practicing Christians are more likely to consult AI—for religious and nonreligious questions alike.

The million-dollar question is, why have so many believers embraced this technology?

The statistical relationship between frequency of church attendance and trust in AI should be a clue. The more fervently a person believes, the more likely they are to embrace AI—because AI serves the same purpose in their lives as their religion does. To be perhaps too blunt, it alleviates the need to think for yourself.

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That stuff will kill you, burning out your eyes and lungs. And it’s everywhere where agriculture is practiced. We’ve got tanks of it stored just outside of town, and whenever I’m stuck at a railroad crossing, I see the tank cars full of that stuff rolling by, and I wonder what I’d do if the train derailed right in front of me. Die, probably, painfully. I doubt that I could outrun the cloud of ammonia.

Who needs ghosts and witches and monsters when we’ve got modern industrial farming? Go ahead, read some accident reports to give yourself nightmares.

To understand the need for a wealth tax, we have to understand that while most people pay taxes on income, the very wealthy pay almost no tax. How do they do it? Because they do not receive any taxable income. For example, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin receive salaries of just one dollar per year. They receive their massive compensation in the form of stock that become taxable only when they sell any of it, and even then they pay only the capital gains rate which is a maximum of 20%, much lower than the top income tax bracket of 37%. But they do not pay even that. What they do is keep their stock intact without selling and take out loans with the stock as collateral. Since these are loans, they are not taxed at all. So these people have access to huge amounts of money to spend lavishly without incurring any tax liability.

The tax policies that are so favorable to the wealthy have resulted in a massive expansion in the wealth gap, as Nicholas Lemann writes.

Back in 1959, in what’s thought to be one of the first precise calculations of the distribution of wealth in the United States, the economist Robert Lampman found that, six years earlier, the top one per cent of adult wealth holders—those who had at least sixty thousand dollars in assets—had accounted for twenty-four per cent of national wealth, and that their share had fallen considerably since the nineteen-twenties. Inequality began accelerating again in the late seventies, and the amount of assets in the hands of the top one per cent increased dramatically. Today, that group, made up of those with more than eleven million dollars in net wealth, holds thirty-two per cent of national wealth. Just the top tenth of one per cent hold fifteen per cent of national wealth, amounting to twenty-eight trillion dollars.

To bring down this wealth gap and deal with the way the wealthy are avoiding paying any tax, some have proposed the imposition of a tax on wealth itself, so that the value of their stock holdings and other assets are taxed. This movement has been developing for some time.

The Occupy movement, which began in 2011, focussed on the top one per cent as a target. Two years later, the French economist Thomas Piketty, in his best-selling book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” proposed a wealth tax, along with much higher top income-tax rates, as the only way to reverse growing inequality. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders shocked the Democratic establishment by running a close race against Hillary Clinton for the Party’s Presidential nomination, thanks to his insistent focus on income and wealth inequality. In 2018, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have close ties to Piketty, and David Gamage, a former Berkeley law professor, began working with Senator Elizabeth Warren on a wealth-tax proposal for her 2020 Presidential campaign: a two-per-cent annual tax on all personal wealth above fifty million dollars. Sanders, who was running for President again, soon offered a version of his own, with a lower threshold, of sixteen million dollars.

What was distinctive about these ideas was not only that they were wealth taxes; it was also that they limited the scope to a small number of very rich people, in recognition of the enormous growth in big fortunes, especially in Silicon Valley. 

While the federal wealth tax did not gain traction (not surprising since Congress is largely bought and sold by the oligarchs), the referendum process allows grass roots measures to bypass it, even though it applies only at the state level. Proposition 40 is the first attempt to do so that has a real chance of success.

In the world of wealth-tax proposals, there are a few essential variables. What’s the level of wealth below which people won’t be taxed? What’s the rate? How long will the tax be levied?  While Saez and his team calculated how much revenue various answers to these questions would produce, Regan commissioned polls to test the popularity of several different options. The result was a one-time, five-per-cent tax on fortunes of at least a billion dollars, payable over five years, with ninety per cent of the estimated hundred billion dollars in proceeds directed toward restoring health care threatened by Trump’s cuts.

As you can imagine, the oligarchs have flipped out at the thought of California passing such a tax and having to pay even a tiny fraction of their vast wealth and have launched a full scale war against it, and they have used their clout to get some allies who are seen as liberals, such as governor Gavin Newsom, though I have argued before that Newsom is not a friend of progressives and likes to cozy up to his fellow millionaires. Other presumptive liberal politicians and organizations have also expressed reservations about this proposition.

Two who are outspoken supporters are senator Bernie Sanders and congressman Ro Khanna whose district is slap bang in the middle of Silicon Valley, where many of the tech billionaires are located. As Khanna says:

“There’s a view that the biggest threat to American democracy is Donald Trump and not winning the House or Senate, and that we would be foolish to kneecap the prominent billionaires who are on our side. Why are we taking them on when we need their funding to compete with Elon Musk and the other billionaires on the Republican side?”

To Khanna, this is a major misreading of the mood in the Democratic Party, and he thinks that potential Presidential candidates should take note. “I believe that taxing billionaires will be one of the three key pillars to a Democratic campaign,” he said. “In my view, it’s Medicare for All, taxing billionaires, and not having foreign wars. Taxing billionaires is a key component. Joe Biden initially was going to be running on this in ’24.” For Democrats in 2028, he said, the question will be “Where do you stand?”

In order to confuse the issue, the oligarchs have introduced two other propositions.

Proposition 41 and Proposition 42, the two initiatives meant to nullify Proposition 40, will have tens of millions of dollars devoted to their campaigns. Proposition 41 presents itself as a measure to improve how the state audits spending, and Proposition 42 as a way of protecting people’s retirement savings from unexpected taxation. “Proposition 41 and Proposition 42 are hilariously cynical,” Brian Galle, one of the Proposition 40 authors, told me. “They are an anti-billionaire-tax burrito. There’s a wrapper that looks harmless”—and, inside, poison-pill provisions that would negate Proposition 40. In California, when conflicting initiatives pass, only the one with the most votes takes effect. So it’s possible that Proposition 40 could pass but still fail, if either Proposition 41 or Proposition 42 gets more votes.

The billionaires opposed to the wealth tax have threatened that if it passes, they will move out of the state. Some people like Newsom have said that this is why they do not favor the California tax but would favor a national wealth tax. But such a tax would be impossible to pass with Republicans in Congress. If California could pass it, it could serve as a model for the nation.

The advantage of state wealth taxes is that they don’t face the barrier of the Constitution’s restriction on direct federal taxation, which was amended for income but not for wealth. The advantage of a new federal wealth tax is that billionaires could not move from state to state to avoid it. (Newsom says that he favors a national tax on billionaires for this reason.) Several European nations—France and Norway, for example—have imposed wealth taxes, only to see some of the intended targets move their legal residences to other countries. The United States puts much higher barriers in the way of people who want to move out of the country to avoid taxes: they have to renounce their citizenship, and, if they’re rich, they have to pay an immediate, severe exit tax. The authors of Proposition 40 are in favor of trying to impose wealth taxes at any level of government, but others argue that a national wealth tax has the best chance of success here.

The oligarchs always act as if society would be devastated if they move elsewhere, a view very much in the tradition of Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged where all the titans of industry withdraw their services and move to a remote part of the country in protest at the restrictions on them. Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced a similar threat from the wealthy when he raised income taxes, to which he responded with sarcasm in a speech.

“You would think, to hear some people talk, that those good people who live at the top of our economic pyramid are being taxed into rags and tatters. What is the fact? The fact is that they are much farther away from the poorhouse than they were in 1932. You and I know that as a matter of personal observation.

A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if I am reelected they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in almost any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A.”

I agree with FDR. Studies have shown that raising taxes in one state does not significantly result in wealthy people moving to another state. But even if they do so this time, I for one will not miss these parasites who have a highly exaggerated sense of themselves, and think that they do not need society as a whole.

Tom Steyer, Proposition 40’s only known billionaire supporter and a former candidate for governor, told me that last fall he tried to find a compromise with the measure’s opponents: “I suggested to several super-rich Californians, ‘Look, if you don’t like this, why don’t we sit down and come up with something that works from your standpoint and actually addresses the issues?’ And they had no interest in doing it.” Steyer, who made his fortune by starting a hedge fund in San Francisco, explained the difference between himself and the other billionaires by saying that he is more aware of the connection between rich people and society as a whole. “The idea that extraordinarily rich people can succeed without the support of society, and that they can preserve their wealth in the face of suffering and inequality—I don’t believe it can happen, and I know it shouldn’t happen,” he said.
…

Whose vision of billionaires will prevail? If it’s Steyer’s, and evidently much of the public’s, then we may be in for a change in the workings of the country as major as the advent of the income tax. For a national wealth tax, Emmanuel Saez told me, “five per cent a year is what I would call a small, reasonable package. Things are moving very fast right now. Proposition 40 is the best shot we’ve ever had, and that’s why I’m not surprised at the interest in it. If it passes, it will be a revolution.” 

Another important issue up for a vote is Proposition 3 that makes permanent a “thirteen-per-cent state income tax on millionaires, which went into effect in 2012 and is due to expire in 2030.” There is also a Proposition 39 that would require voters to present a government-issued ID, a Trump-favored measure to try and suppress voting.

So I will vote ‘Yes’ on 3 and 40 and ‘No’ on 39, 41 and 42.

TITLE:  MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE

Premise:  One of those rapture predictions has people out on the hilltops waiting for a light to lift them out of earthly travail.  Maybe the hopped-up preacher (KING OF CUPS, INVERTED) who convinced the flock did have a line on some kind of cosmic truth, because a light doth come (HEAVEN/PARADISE).  But it doesn’t take anyone away.  They come back to town with a blissed-out expression and try to resume their lives where they’d left off.

The Villain:  Some kind of alien hive mind has designs on our tasty biome.  Monch monch.  It wouldn’t be much of a villain without personifying itself at some point, so I’d have it speak through its victims, show that it is intelligent.

Horror Element:  The hive mind has hijacked the faithful’s bodies (IMPOSTER) and is teasing their neurons and endocrine system into thinking everything is great – right up until the point where they move to the nearest crowd and erupt into a swarm of glowing moth-like alien organisms, which rush to infect as many people as possible (INFESTATION).  Their wings sound like an otherworldly chorus.
–

–
This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it.  Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, and the free version was unable or unwilling to do a basic-ass revision I wanted on this.  I chucked some filters on it and am calling it a night.

–

I expect a very smooth transition.

The winners of the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine have been announced: it’s Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann, for their work in optogenetics.

Back in my day, we’d have to pull a fine glass electrode and jab it into a cell to put an electrical current in it, and see what twitched or secreted or changed gene expression in response. It was admittedly a bit clumsy and had side effects: most of the cells I stabbed would die in response. Optogenetics lets a researcher modify the genetics of precursor cells so that they would produce a novel channel, a light sensitive rhodopsin derived from algae, that lurked in the membrane, and would only open when a light was shone on it. Instead of a needle, you could aim a laser at the cell, and trigger a current across the membrane non-invasively.

It’s a neat trick. You can have a whole nervous system laid out on your microscope, loaded with inherited copies of this rhodopsin, and cruise around zapping cells with a beam of light, and see what happens when those cells are stimulated. Or put a fiber optic in a brain and switch on neurons with a pulse of light. There are so many fun things to do!

How do they do that? They’re based in South East Asia, and they started by hiring low-cost regional writers who could churn out articles with little research, but then they ended up firing most of them and going even cheaper.

“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”

At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.

“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”

The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism, their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)

They’re not done. They’re branching out into technology companies that produce more AI dreck.

The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.

Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”

Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”

Look forward to even more slop on the web. They are pumping out so much garbage, that they aren’t even bothering to proofread anymore. Why should they? It’s not as if quality matters in their content.

Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”

At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.

I guess you can’t trust anything you read on the internet. At the very least you should avoid anything on this list of every known BBM publication.

So coming up with an idea a day every day for a month.  Weekdays smoke my life like a cigarette, not much left in the tank at ten PM.  Makes me feel like on the weekend, I should make up for that lost time and get ahead.  Feeling that more than usual at the moment for some reason.  However, I don’t know what the prompt is going to be until the day of, so how can I make use of the time I have today?

In the rap tradition of freestyling, one is supposed to compose your rhymes to the beat as it’s playing, to impress the audience with the speed of your thought.  That is as hard as it sounds.  I might be able freestyle to a modest tempo with an established formula, like adding verses to “American Pie,” but that fast shit?  Impossible.  Well, the rappers aren’t usually doing it 100% spontaneously either.  They come up with a bunch of rhymes that they can flex to match whatever music they’re presented with.  It’s still impressive, but less like sorcery.

Remembering this, what kind of idea elements could I come up with in advance, to copy-paste into future challenges?  We’re letting the group pull tarot cards to use as optional themes, but a lot of them are using non-standard decks, so even if I came up with an idea related to every card in the Rider-Waite standard, it wouldn’t help me every day.  Still, might be better than nothing.

I acquired a list purporting to be all those cards plus their most common interpretations, in very brief…

lol, no.  Turns out that was way too ambitious.  Weekend almost over.  Defeat!
Bleh, I’ll just keep freestylin’ jackass style for now.  Maybe next weekend.

If you draw the ten of swords
Sliced and diced to a pile of gore
Cartomancy should be ignored
The day the music died

–

In Czechia, we commonly have at the very least three types of flour: fine, medium, and coarse. AFAIK, this is not the case in most western countries, including the USA and Canada, where usually the only flour available is the “fine” type. If you try to make these foods with fine flour, it might work, but the results will probably have a slightly different consistency and may require some changes.

Here go the recipes.

Savory potato pancakes

500 g of cooked crushed potatoes
2 cups of medium flour
1 teaspoon of salt
2 spoons of cooking oil

Mix the ingredients into a malleable dough, adding either flour or potatoes for the desired consistency. Roll the dough into a 3 mm thick flat and cut pancakes of the desired shape(s) and size(s). We usually use either a round cookie cutter or we simply cut it into squares with a rolling waved-edge cookie cutter. The pancakes can be either fried in a thin layer of oil or lard (lard is IMO the tastier option), or on a dry non-stick pan and subsequently brushed with oil/butter or another fat of preference.

For added taste, it is possible to add fine-diced ham or tofu directly into the dough.

The pancakes are usually eaten either alone or with salami, sausage, or hot dog, or baked meat of any kind, or with cheese of preference.

Bramborák

This is a different type of savory potato pancake. To my knowledge, a traditional Czech dish.

500 g of raw potatoes
2 dcl of milk
2 teaspoons of salt
2 teaspoons of marjoram (or more, or less, according to taste; oregano and basil are suitable substitutes)
8 garlic cloves
2 cups of medium flour
3 spoons of cooking oil

The potatoes need to be either grated on a fine grater or shredded in a food processor/mixer, then mixed with milk, salt, and crushed garlic. Then slowly and thoroughly mix in the flour and oil to make a thin smoothie-like batter. Try to fry a piece, and if the dough is too runny, add flour; if it is too thick, add milk.

For best results, these pancakes are to be fried in lard. Simply scoop the runny dough with a small ladle and pour it onto a hot frying pan. Once the edges turn golden-brown, flip them and fry the other side.

They are usually eaten with a potato-mushroom soup, turning the soup into a full meal and not just a first course. Like the previous kind, they can also be eaten with baked meats, or cold salami or cheese.

The thin dough can also be poured into a baking tray and baked in the oven into a savoury cake. As a kid, I liked this cake baked with whole hot dogs and quarters of sour apples floating on the surface. It does sound strange, but it works.

Savory potato dumplings

AFAIK, this is also traditional Czech food.

1 kg potatoes
2 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
1 spoon of milk
3 spoons of potato starch or flour
3 spoons of fine semolina
400 g of coarse flour

The potatoes need to be cooked at least a day prior, left to sit overnight in the fridge, and then crushed/grated/mashed. Mix the eggs with milk and salt, and pour into the pile of crushed potatoes mixed with the starch, semolina, and flour. Work thoroughly into a somewhat homogeneous dough (there will always be pieces of potato here and there).

Form the dough into dumplings, cylinders approximately 5 cm in diameter and  10-15 cm long. Cook the dumplings submerged in salty boiling water for circa 20 minutes. After they are scooped out of the water, they should be immediately cut into 1-1,5 cm slices. The best way to cut hot dumplings is with dental floss or another type of strong, thin, flexible thread. To cut the dumpling, the thread is scooped under it to the desired position, then crossed over it and firmly pulled – that results in a clean, straight cut.

These dumplings are most commonly eaten as a side dish with baked meats or poultry, together with either sauerkraut or pickled/steamed/cooked/baked vegetables. My favourite combination is with baked duck and spinach. Sometimes these dumplings are made with a hot dog rolled into the cylinder.

If desired, for the dumplings to absorb fat more readily when eaten with particularly greasy meats, white bread cut into small cubes can be added to the dough.

Fruit potato dumplings

The only sweet dish in this round.

250 g of soft cottage cheese
250 g of crushed boiled potatoes
250 g of medium flour
2 spoons of fine semolina
2 eggs
5 spoons of cooking oil
a pinch of salt
a pinch of baking powder

Whisk the cottage cheese with eggs, oil, salt, and baking powder. Then add flour and semolina while continuing to whisk. At last, add the potatoes until a malleable dough is created.

To create the dumplings, a piece of fruit about the size of a plum should be wrapped in a few mm of dough to make a ball. Usually used fruits are: plums, apricots, peaches, apples, cherries, strawberries, blueberries. You can also use jam or marmalade instead of whole fruit.

Formed dumplings are either cooked for 8 min in salty water or for 15 min in steam. When using water, take extra care to make the dumplings watertight so the fruit or jam doesn’t spill out.

These dumplings are usually eaten as a standalone dish, sprinkled with sweet cocoa powder, powdered sugar, grated hard cottage cheese, and melted butter.

That’s the batch of recipes for now; have fun if you try them.

In all of these recipes, a part of the potatoes can be substituted with pumpkins, squash, or zucchini.

Ted Beale and the books he hasn’t read

Not really. My criticism was that his math was invalid and that he thinks evolution is a simple serial process (the same thing Zach Hancock pointed out), but he ignores that and instead asserts that he is a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting. He has donned the armor of impenetrable narcissism. As usual, it is his own words that demolish him.

Shows what I know, though. He’s got Jesus backing him.

And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.