More than $5000

The current occupant has promised $5000 to every adult American if Republicans retain control of Congress. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, There ain’t any $5000, there ain’t going to be any $5000, there never has been any $5000, that’s the $5000.

But I think there’s more to this faux-promise than dollar signs. I think that the occupant made this faux-promise knowing that he will never have to make good on it, and that the failure to make good on it will then be something he can hang on Democrats. If, say, Republicans became a minority in the House, any new Democratic representative who flipped a seat will have a target on their back for having deprived Americans of the money the occupant promised them.

Does the occupant have the cognitive ability to scheme thusly? Who knows. Perhaps someone suggested the idea to him.

On the 81st floor

“On the 81st floor, there were no Republicans or Democrats, no Black or white. We were just brothers trying to find the way out”: “25 years ago, two strangers met in the twin towers and escaped on 9/11. What happened next?” (The Guardian ).

This story is new to me, and I think it’s worth sharing.

A visit to Ground Zero and St. Paul’s Chapel

A post I wrote in 2008.

And I’ll update a sentence I wrote in 2022:

It’s now twenty-five years after the fact, and I still can’t see a cloudless sky without thinking of September 11, 2001.

A captive audience

We watched just a few minutes of last night’s hatefest in Dallas, enough to hear the current occupant boast that no one was leaving as he spoke. Elaine wondered if everyone was bused in and couldn’t leave.

And that was pretty much the case: attending the event was only possible by taking a bus (the “GOP Express”) from Lone Star Park to the American Airlines Center, a 13.5-mile trip, and return trips were to begin only after the night’s proceedings ended. A DART station was closed, and no Lyft or Uber vehicles were permitted within the event’s “secure zone.” No wonder no one was leaving early.

Which means, by the way, that all the empty seats we saw must have been empty from much earlier in the day.

Ghost in the Machine

From a PBS e-mail:

Ghost in the Machine is an investigative documentary exposing the buried history of artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power long before it entered everyday life.

Rejecting the notion of AI as inevitable or objective, the film traces how myths of progress and efficiency have obscured deeper political and cultural agendas, revealing the ideological foundations beneath the systems now reshaping modern society. Who built these systems, whose values do they encode, and who do they benefit?

The documentary, by filmmaker Valerie Veatch, airs on Independent Lens this coming Monday.

Which prompts me to paste here a comment that I left on an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, “Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom”:

I found this a remarkably cheerful and uncritical discussion of generative AI, which has made the work of evaluating student writing a hellscape for many instructors. It’s telling that the University of Chicago has banned gen AI in first-year law courses and some undergrad courses. UC Berkeley has banned gen AI in all law courses. Harvard, though, is all in, encouraging faculty to use gen AI and offering a $699 course in entrepreneurship taught by AI clones of business faculty. At the same time, Harvard has closed its Writing Center, where a student could work one-to-one with another human. Arizona State is repackaging course materials in bits and pieces for use in online course offerings. At SUNY Buffalo, the Chief AI Officer has advanced the idea of having a chatbot give students oral exams. And Texas Tech is using AI to comb through syllabi for suspect texts (anything foregrounding sexual orientation or gender identity).

There are many, many questions to ask here, and a need for a much more critical perspective.

[A habitual OCA reader will recognize that most of my examples come from recent posts.]

Dylan and others

My son Ben let me know something I didn’t: that Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” borrows from Paul Clayton’s “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone),” which itself borrows from “Who Gon Bring You Chickens,” published in a 1927 compilation, Eight Negro Songs (From Bedford Co. Virginia). Much more about these three songs at Bring You Chickens.

The traditional-to-Clayton-to-Dylan story is widely known. I gave Ben one back, which I’m not sure anyone else knows: Dylan’s “Moonlight” borrows from Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf’s “Memories of You.” The lyrics and melody are Dylan’s. But listen to the chord changes: they’re Blake’s.

Nothing wrong about that: countless tunes have been written over the chord changes of American standards. And Dylan knows standards.

A joke in the traditional manner

What did the thirsty lizard say?

Three ratings from beta testers, eight, six, and six: “It’s funny,” “Pretty good,” and straight-out laughter.

The punchline is in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA jokes in the traditional or neo-traditional or non-traditional manner

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad, who was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” Merriam-Webster’s first citation: 1987. I continue in the traditional manner.]

Font patter

Elle Cordova, “Modern Day Typographer.”

Recently updated

Slipping the surly bonds: Now with a link to a more expansive account of the current occupant’s 9/11 fantasies.

Slipping the surly bonds

The current occupant is telling a new and improved version of his ever-shifting 9/11 saga. Aaron Rupar has the video. The occupant now claims that he went to the site of the World Trade Center with a construction crew on September 11, 2001, and that as the U.S. Steel Building creaked and appeared ready to come down, two firefighters lifted him up and ran with him from the danger.

There is, of course, no evidence for any of this. Is the occupant blurring events of 9/11 and his exit stage left in Butler, Pennsylvania? Is he blurring events of 9/11 and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he was shuffled off the dais? Is his story unrelated to either of those events? There are so many ways to slip the surly bonds of reality.

In a sane country, this sick, shameful story would be front and center at every news outlet.

*

September 9: from Judd Legum’s Popular Information, a more expansive account of the occupant’s 9/11 fantasies.