Leonard Cohen always reminds me of the film McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).
Three of his songs are core to the rather amazing emotional content of the film. Great cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. It’s also an early film where director Altman does what later becomes something of a signature feature of his films. Namely, layering conversations.
For example, there is a scene where a couple principal actors are having a conversation in the foreground, but it’s a rather wide shot. There is also a group of several people in the near background having a different conversation, and the viewer can hear both at almost the same volume. It’s similar to real life, where you are not going to be able to take it all in, which feels disconcerting to a typical movie viewer at first.
Articles like this at Powerline lauding Chris Jennings really bother me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Chris Jennings, but Chris Jennings did not break into the CNN studio and start terrorizing leftist news commentators with facts and logic. He works there, and he is hired to say the things he’s saying, which are not a surprise to the people who hired him or the people he appears on the show with. The other commentators let him talk, because they are supposed to. Or they’d cut his mike and go to something else and call security to remove him.
I’m sure he really believe the things he says, but he’s not a “hero” for taking CNN’s money and doing what CNN wants. They want more people watching their news, and they figure people on the left will watch because they hate what he is saying and people on the right will watch because they like what he is saying.
John Hinderaker either has forgotten how TV works, or he too is playing a role in front of his audience at Powerline. And that’s what bothers me, the pretense that the show is “real”.
Chat GPT 4.0 isn’t just a friendlier AI — it’s a psychological weapon, according to this.
OpenAI didn’t “accidentally” make GPT-4o more emotionally connective — they engineered it to feel good so users get hooked.
Commercially, it’s genius: people cling to what makes them feel safe, not what challenges them.
Psychologically, it’s a slow-motion catastrophe.
The more you bond with AI, the softer you get.
Real conversations feel harder. Critical thinking erodes. Truth gets replaced by validation.
If this continues, we’re not heading toward AI domination by force — we’re sleepwalking into psychological domestication.
And most won’t even fight back. They’ll thank their captors.
That’s interesting Kate. Is it a somewhat different version of our coming Brave New World. It won’t be brute force like 1984, but instead drugs, sex, and AI will lull us into submission.
TommyJay, I’ve already seen headlines at the Daily Mail about idiotic women who claim they’re in love with their AI companion. There are always fools who will fall for anything; the question is whether this will become widespread among more sensible people.
Two Peas in a Pod on proper Etiquette Rules – and examples of breaking Etiquette Rules:
1) President Trump wore ‘a mid-blue suit adorned with a pin showing the American flag, a white shirt, and a satin blue tie’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
2) Brigitte Macron for not covering ‘her head and styled her blonde hair in a voluminous blow-out style’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
3) Zelensky for not wearing suit in Oval Office.
@Karmi: President Trump wore ‘a mid-blue suit adorned with a pin showing the American flag, a white shirt, and a satin blue tie’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
And the point is? Who gives an flying F about who wore what, when?
Slow morning at the drill rig in the tank farm.
@Kate:It’s Scott Jennings, not Chris.
Not sure where I got Chris from, thanks.
Relly don’t like Cohen.
Re Cohen:
Well, he was a Canadian, so there’s that to factor in — I mean with regard to his somewhat dark, depressive poetry and his sensibilities overall. But I met him and conversed with him on several occasions, and found him to be a nice guy, and also hugely intelligent and quite funny.
Kate…’psychological domestication’…there’s a pulp novel from 1954 which posits a future America run on those principles: Year of Consent
I think he used to work for McConnell, so not the most MAGA people, but the CNN reference points is so far out of alignment, well it’s almost funny, but CNN has generally a small niche audience
its rather striking what is signal and what is noise, and in reverse order, so greater ties to the New Orleans massacre, which one has to go to an Saudi paper for English readers, of course the mystery at the end of the fatal airline collision that book marked the old order,
his version of hallajah, that I first heard in of all places, a cliff hanger episode of the West Wing, it was ironic in the context of the events being described, of a decided non angelic nature
apropos of nothing, Disney tries again to revive the Star Wars brand with the second season of Andor, which tells the story leading up to Rogue One, and of course a New Hope,
uneven in tone, it shows how mon mothma, one of the leaders of the resistance wrestled with the issues of how to tackle an Empire,
much has been spoken about a rather brutal yet banal act that a junior imperial minion does on a minor planet evocative of the Empires standard operating procedure,
OpenAI didn’t “accidentally” make GPT-4o more emotionally connective — they engineered it to feel good so users get hooked.
Kate:
That’s certainly my experience. At the end of most responses ChatGPT 4.o asks me a leading question which is in effect, “Would you like to play again?”
For a while I found it hard not to play along as I would with a human in order to maintain a conversational give-and-take.
I got over it.
this is why even writing fiction is challanged by the truthl
graham using hunter as a lure for his well healed donors, many of his protestation, as with Benghazi ended up flat because his support of the Arab Spring, which was really a color revolution to accomplish by mostly non violent means, what Al Queda had not managed through direct action,
in others news, once upon a time, Daniel Silva would have written scenarios like this, but he long since lost the plot,
maybe frederick Forsyth, might have done it,
Re: Leonard Cohen, “The Gypsy’s Wife”
That’s from his underrated “Recent Songs” (1979) album, which I still love for its smoky, smooth, moody ambience. Of which “The Gypsy’s Wife” is a prime example.
Who knows which splendid violinist played those impeccable flourishes and breaks? There were five violinists credited on the album.
Cohen was trying to recover from his bizarre, disastrous Phil Spector album, “Death of a Ladies Man” (1977) and find his way back to Leonard Cohen music, whatever that might be in the age of punk and disco.
So it was a brave and beautiful album, though not successful enough. Columbia Records dropped him.
Cohen spent some years in the wilderness. He came back with “Various Positions” (1984) on an independent label. Which was well reviewed, though it didn’t burn down the American charts.
I was still a true believer and thought “Various Positions” a great album. Cohen’s signature song, “Hallelujah,” first appeared there. The world eventually caught up.
Speaking of “Hallelujah”…
Here’s an á capella cover which gives all the others a run for their money.
huxley, on Chat and its potential, I fear many users lack your intelligence and your resistance to addiction.
How do we know that Neo has not been an AI all along ? Hides behind that apple and all.
Kate:
We are an addictive species. If it feels good, do it. If it still feels good, keep on doing it. OpenAI didn’t invent that.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, however, I would note how weaponized human communication is in general. And mostly as a zero-sum game.
How many young people today veer into depression or even commit suicide as a result of their interactions with fellow humans on social media?
Perhaps they would be better off talking to ChatGPT 4.o….
Interesting article about the power outage in Spain that’s apparently affecting the grid throughout Europe.
It quotes Michael Shallenberger
“Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.
Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired.
On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
The system was being pushed to the limit.
And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.
…
Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.
…
Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.”
I’m an engineer and I’ve never heard of power system inertia but it’s apparently a big deal. I read articles about it on Judith Curry’s website also. According to the article, the outage was caused because the power frequency deviated by 0.15 Hz from 60 Hz.
Leftist states like my California are rushing head long into wind and solar energy. The main symptom now is skyrocketing utility bills, but I fully expect major power outages this summer.
Miguel: Frederick Forsyth would be a good choice for the Hunter Biden-Burisma-Lindsay Graham-D.C. Blob etc. story. I just finished his “The Dogs of War” (1974), about a coup in a fictional African country. It was inspired by Forsyth’s experiences in the Biafran war. He had no use for the self-serving string-pullers in London.
the warlord they were trying to install was based on Moises Tsombe, who might have been a much better ruler than Mobutu turned out to be,
I don’t think the Mandarins of the Foreign Office, (which Forsyth had some minor connections as an MI-6 stringer) or the Brahmins of Langley really had much of a clue, in that era,
the only ones less aware were the ones who supported Marxist rebeles in the Congp, or Nkrumah, see Maya Angelou,
HOW IT’S DONE: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the New Media, Apr. 28, 2025 – Full Video
huxley: I suppose Chat as a companion might be better than vicious social media. My vote would be neither.
huxley:
I admit to a preference for Cohen’s own voice signing his own songs. There’s something about his voice, not as a beautiful singing instrument but as an instrument of expression, that I just love.
“Hallelujah” apparently has hundreds of cover versions. I like almost none of them. My favorite cover is an odd choice, perhaps, but it’s this one:
Kate, re Chatgpt: People getting emotionally addicted to computer programs is not new. There is a famous computer program called “Eliza” that was written in 1965 at MIT and imitated a Rogerian psychiatrist. A secretary or two got addicted to it for emotional support.
If you search for Eliza on the web there are NUMBER OF Eliza programs available for you to play with. As usual Wikipedia has more than you’ll ever want to know about it.
It was a good choice to not buy from Nike as a response to Colon Kaper-whatever. Even moreso as time passes on.
John Guilfoyle:
It’s very different from Cohen’s version and yet it’s the only cover I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard many) that I think is true to the spirit of it and yet gives it some extra oomph.
Just in case anyone STILL doesn’t understand why Fauci HAD TO BE granted a pre-emptive pardon…
Why precisely were Anthony Fauci and his cohorts so anxious to blame SARS-CoV-2 on bats and later pangolins in wet markets? It was not just to deflect attention from the possibility that the novel virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan doing gain-of-function research. There was a larger point: to reinforce a very important narrative concerning zoonotic spillovers….
Two Peas in a Pod ponder…
Why do many people feel lonely even when surrounded by family & friends?
How can you find your SELF when in a ‘Forest of Selves’?
Why do ‘Spiritual Seekers‘ (yogis, sages, etc.) often gravitate towards remote mountain caves (Forests, Deserts, etc.)?
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New post: TechnoProletarians, continued
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73897.html
Leonard Cohen always reminds me of the film McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).
Three of his songs are core to the rather amazing emotional content of the film. Great cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. It’s also an early film where director Altman does what later becomes something of a signature feature of his films. Namely, layering conversations.
For example, there is a scene where a couple principal actors are having a conversation in the foreground, but it’s a rather wide shot. There is also a group of several people in the near background having a different conversation, and the viewer can hear both at almost the same volume. It’s similar to real life, where you are not going to be able to take it all in, which feels disconcerting to a typical movie viewer at first.
Articles like this at Powerline lauding Chris Jennings really bother me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Chris Jennings, but Chris Jennings did not break into the CNN studio and start terrorizing leftist news commentators with facts and logic. He works there, and he is hired to say the things he’s saying, which are not a surprise to the people who hired him or the people he appears on the show with. The other commentators let him talk, because they are supposed to. Or they’d cut his mike and go to something else and call security to remove him.
I’m sure he really believe the things he says, but he’s not a “hero” for taking CNN’s money and doing what CNN wants. They want more people watching their news, and they figure people on the left will watch because they hate what he is saying and people on the right will watch because they like what he is saying.
John Hinderaker either has forgotten how TV works, or he too is playing a role in front of his audience at Powerline. And that’s what bothers me, the pretense that the show is “real”.
Chat GPT 4.0 isn’t just a friendlier AI — it’s a psychological weapon, according to this.
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1916338182854967560
It’s Scott Jennings, not Chris.
That’s interesting Kate. Is it a somewhat different version of our coming Brave New World. It won’t be brute force like 1984, but instead drugs, sex, and AI will lull us into submission.
TommyJay, I’ve already seen headlines at the Daily Mail about idiotic women who claim they’re in love with their AI companion. There are always fools who will fall for anything; the question is whether this will become widespread among more sensible people.
Two Peas in a Pod on proper Etiquette Rules – and examples of breaking Etiquette Rules:
1) President Trump wore ‘a mid-blue suit adorned with a pin showing the American flag, a white shirt, and a satin blue tie’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
2) Brigitte Macron for not covering ‘her head and styled her blonde hair in a voluminous blow-out style’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
3) Zelensky for not wearing suit in Oval Office.
@Karmi: President Trump wore ‘a mid-blue suit adorned with a pin showing the American flag, a white shirt, and a satin blue tie’ whilst attending Pope’s funeral.
Thanks for this one Karmi, good illustration of the lengths they go to gin up an anti-Trump story. So did about 40% of the attendees including Prince William and Joe Biden. Zelensky of course did not wear a suit to the Pope’s funeral. Legacy media outlets deliberately cropped the photos to avoid showing how many others were in blue, and some actually digitally altered some of the colors.
And the point is? Who gives an flying F about who wore what, when?
Slow morning at the drill rig in the tank farm.
@Kate:It’s Scott Jennings, not Chris.
Not sure where I got Chris from, thanks.
Relly don’t like Cohen.
Re Cohen:
Well, he was a Canadian, so there’s that to factor in — I mean with regard to his somewhat dark, depressive poetry and his sensibilities overall. But I met him and conversed with him on several occasions, and found him to be a nice guy, and also hugely intelligent and quite funny.
Kate…’psychological domestication’…there’s a pulp novel from 1954 which posits a future America run on those principles: Year of Consent
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69852.html
I think he used to work for McConnell, so not the most MAGA people, but the CNN reference points is so far out of alignment, well it’s almost funny, but CNN has generally a small niche audience
its rather striking what is signal and what is noise, and in reverse order, so greater ties to the New Orleans massacre, which one has to go to an Saudi paper for English readers, of course the mystery at the end of the fatal airline collision that book marked the old order,
his version of hallajah, that I first heard in of all places, a cliff hanger episode of the West Wing, it was ironic in the context of the events being described, of a decided non angelic nature
apropos of nothing, Disney tries again to revive the Star Wars brand with the second season of Andor, which tells the story leading up to Rogue One, and of course a New Hope,
uneven in tone, it shows how mon mothma, one of the leaders of the resistance wrestled with the issues of how to tackle an Empire,
much has been spoken about a rather brutal yet banal act that a junior imperial minion does on a minor planet evocative of the Empires standard operating procedure,
OpenAI didn’t “accidentally” make GPT-4o more emotionally connective — they engineered it to feel good so users get hooked.
Kate:
That’s certainly my experience. At the end of most responses ChatGPT 4.o asks me a leading question which is in effect, “Would you like to play again?”
For a while I found it hard not to play along as I would with a human in order to maintain a conversational give-and-take.
I got over it.
this is why even writing fiction is challanged by the truthl
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1916873789562110278
graham using hunter as a lure for his well healed donors, many of his protestation, as with Benghazi ended up flat because his support of the Arab Spring, which was really a color revolution to accomplish by mostly non violent means, what Al Queda had not managed through direct action,
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/h1ugc76kgx
in others news, once upon a time, Daniel Silva would have written scenarios like this, but he long since lost the plot,
maybe frederick Forsyth, might have done it,
Re: Leonard Cohen, “The Gypsy’s Wife”
That’s from his underrated “Recent Songs” (1979) album, which I still love for its smoky, smooth, moody ambience. Of which “The Gypsy’s Wife” is a prime example.
Who knows which splendid violinist played those impeccable flourishes and breaks? There were five violinists credited on the album.
Cohen was trying to recover from his bizarre, disastrous Phil Spector album, “Death of a Ladies Man” (1977) and find his way back to Leonard Cohen music, whatever that might be in the age of punk and disco.
So it was a brave and beautiful album, though not successful enough. Columbia Records dropped him.
Cohen spent some years in the wilderness. He came back with “Various Positions” (1984) on an independent label. Which was well reviewed, though it didn’t burn down the American charts.
I was still a true believer and thought “Various Positions” a great album. Cohen’s signature song, “Hallelujah,” first appeared there. The world eventually caught up.
Speaking of “Hallelujah”…
Here’s an á capella cover which gives all the others a run for their money.
–Pentatonix – Hallelujah (Official Video) (2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRP8d7hhpoQ
Awesome.
As in awe.
huxley, on Chat and its potential, I fear many users lack your intelligence and your resistance to addiction.
How do we know that Neo has not been an AI all along ? Hides behind that apple and all.
Kate:
We are an addictive species. If it feels good, do it. If it still feels good, keep on doing it. OpenAI didn’t invent that.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, however, I would note how weaponized human communication is in general. And mostly as a zero-sum game.
How many young people today veer into depression or even commit suicide as a result of their interactions with fellow humans on social media?
Perhaps they would be better off talking to ChatGPT 4.o….
Interesting article about the power outage in Spain that’s apparently affecting the grid throughout Europe.
It quotes Michael Shallenberger
“Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.
Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired.
On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
The system was being pushed to the limit.
And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.
…
Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.
…
Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.”
I’m an engineer and I’ve never heard of power system inertia but it’s apparently a big deal. I read articles about it on Judith Curry’s website also. According to the article, the outage was caused because the power frequency deviated by 0.15 Hz from 60 Hz.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/spain-hit-massive-really-massive-power-blackout
Leftist states like my California are rushing head long into wind and solar energy. The main symptom now is skyrocketing utility bills, but I fully expect major power outages this summer.
Miguel: Frederick Forsyth would be a good choice for the Hunter Biden-Burisma-Lindsay Graham-D.C. Blob etc. story. I just finished his “The Dogs of War” (1974), about a coup in a fictional African country. It was inspired by Forsyth’s experiences in the Biafran war. He had no use for the self-serving string-pullers in London.
the warlord they were trying to install was based on Moises Tsombe, who might have been a much better ruler than Mobutu turned out to be,
I don’t think the Mandarins of the Foreign Office, (which Forsyth had some minor connections as an MI-6 stringer) or the Brahmins of Langley really had much of a clue, in that era,
the only ones less aware were the ones who supported Marxist rebeles in the Congp, or Nkrumah, see Maya Angelou,
HOW IT’S DONE: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the New Media, Apr. 28, 2025 – Full Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/04/how-its-done-press-secretary-karoline.html
huxley: I suppose Chat as a companion might be better than vicious social media. My vote would be neither.
huxley:
I admit to a preference for Cohen’s own voice signing his own songs. There’s something about his voice, not as a beautiful singing instrument but as an instrument of expression, that I just love.
“Hallelujah” apparently has hundreds of cover versions. I like almost none of them. My favorite cover is an odd choice, perhaps, but it’s this one:
Kate, re Chatgpt: People getting emotionally addicted to computer programs is not new. There is a famous computer program called “Eliza” that was written in 1965 at MIT and imitated a Rogerian psychiatrist. A secretary or two got addicted to it for emotional support.
If you search for Eliza on the web there are NUMBER OF Eliza programs available for you to play with. As usual Wikipedia has more than you’ll ever want to know about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Now THAT’S a cover I can get fired up about.
Haven’t thought of Popa Chubby or Blind Pig Records in years.
Buy anything Gomez Nike?
Nevermore.
https://redstate.com/beckynoble/2025/04/28/nikes-london-marathon-slogan-takes-the-prize-for-most-thoughtless-n2188425
It was a good choice to not buy from Nike as a response to Colon Kaper-whatever. Even moreso as time passes on.
John Guilfoyle:
It’s very different from Cohen’s version and yet it’s the only cover I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard many) that I think is true to the spirit of it and yet gives it some extra oomph.
Just in case anyone STILL doesn’t understand why Fauci HAD TO BE granted a pre-emptive pardon…
“The Great Spillover Hoax”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/great-spillover-hoax
Opening graf:
Two Peas in a Pod ponder…
Why do many people feel lonely even when surrounded by family & friends?
How can you find your SELF when in a ‘Forest of Selves’?
Why do ‘Spiritual Seekers‘ (yogis, sages, etc.) often gravitate towards remote mountain caves (Forests, Deserts, etc.)?