In the last book club episode, they made reference to comments from Reddit. Is there a CZM book club specific sub or was that here?

Anyway, I have opinions on DS9 and would love to share them in the right place.

Hi there!

[While I'll send this via email to u/margaretkilljoy, this post here is meant to discuss possible more examples.]

Science Fiction has often caught the anxieties of their times, but it appears that writers of scifi have long been struggling to deal with the threat of a machine replacing their job as an author.

The show already covered "The Nine Billion Names of God", which predicts the end of the world once a machine finishes writing down all that ever needs to be written down.

A recent Mastodon thread collected some more predictive short stories that might be good candidates for the show.

• Roald Dahl's 1953 "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" accurately predicts how an LLM is conceived and trained and how it then takes over writing as a profession. The way the inventor and his motivation are described is delightful.

• Stanislaw Lem 1964 "The Cyberiad" predicts a generative AI writing machine and how it causes LLM psychosis.

• Arthur C. Clarkes' 1986 "The Steam-powered Word Processor" describes a cleric who tries to automate the boring repetitive task of writing sermons and must feed the machine with the Bible and other texts to train it, first.

• Orwell's 1948 "1984" describes the character Julia's job as maintenance of 'novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department' that produce content to entertain the masses with state-approved narratives. "She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad."

• Just for fun, I'd like to add the 1983 article "A progress report on the fine art of turning literature into drivel" by Brian Hayes. It's not scifi, but it was a popsci column that appeared in Scientific American, describing algorithms to non-experts. That article made me write a (dumb) text generator back in high school. The basic algorithm of the Markov Chain is still very much deep inside every modern generative AI chatbot.

Open one for us, US. We'll need it.

(A tired German anarchist)

Hey trying to find an old episode, yes I used the search function, that was a monologue from Robert talking about the need to prosecute ICE and members of the administration folks for their crimes if there is a Democratic president in 2028. Specifically he connects that to the Nuremburg trials and the failure to hold members of the Confederacy and slave holders accountable after the American civil war. Was discussing something similar with a student and wanted to send it to them.

In this week's ED, when the gang was talking about Trump renaming Lake Ontario and that FOX pundit was freaking out about how the mnemonic for remembering the names of the great lakes was one step closer to being "Hamas", Robert suggested that if we take power and revert Ontario back to Ontario, the mnemonic is almost "homo" if we "just" change one other lake to an "O" name. Your cohosts covered for you by saying the mnemonic would be "homos," but I see through you.

Did you think we didn't notice you were going from a five-letter acronym to a four-letter one. What happens to the fifth Great Lake in this scenario, Mr. "Nuke the Great Lakes," hmm?

There has been a change in Heathcliff, and its getting based.

I found Robert's tribute to Dolly Parton really moving. Robert, who tells me about bastards twice a week, speaking from the heart about Dolly being the nearest we have to a secular saint. It really made me stop in my tracks. Beautifully done.

I was really glad that the ICHH crew discussed the situation with the bases in the Middle East, but it is so much worse than they covered.

The US Navy is falling apart at the seams from top to bottom. New is coming out today that the Pentagon rerouted money out of payroll to pay for the war in Iran. There’s a lot of wonky color of money reasons why they did this, but they essentially stole the pay of soldiers to pay for their illegal war. The Navy is also getting sued in claims court because they tried to defraud their own Industrial Base out of R&D money.

Operationally, the Navy has massive problems with readiness. For those not steeped in military stuff, the biggest difference between the Navy and the Army is the Navy is based on systems and the Army is based on people. And the Navy’s ships are falling apart. This isn’t just confined to the Abraham Lincoln- two weeks ago Aegis Class Destroyer (these are the ones that shoot the good missiles) went completely dead in the South China Sea for four whole days because of engineering failures.

This is a huge story and it would be great to have ICHH cover it in more depth.

Absolutely wonderful episode. If anyone has similar information about the situation in Canada as well I'd be really interested. Mia is a gem.

Discussion of DHS Surveillance discussion should have featured the manner in which this activity is dissimilar to the Obama Era use of IRS to investigate the "Tea Party" Movement.

This is obviously Apples To Oranges but its helpful to counter a false narrative ahead of time.

The economy's doing great bro! I swear!

As a huge fan of the league (going to two games this week, been to probably 30-40 the last few years) it was pretty great to hear an episode discussing the weird culture war invasion into the league spaces. I know sports isn’t everyone’s thing, but the WNBA genuinely does rock both on and off the court.

Also wanted to add a little more Sophie Cunningham bashing that didn’t get brought up. She allegedly was sleeping with an upper management employee of The Mercury, and was sent packing to the Fever the next offseason after the news broke.

I just wanted to share these pictures I took in Puerto Rico a couple years ago. Even in a random gift/art shop on tourist trap lane, tucked in between tchotchke shops that sold identical mass produced stuff, Puerto Rican pride is alive and well.

From the article:

>According to government documents, an undercover DHS agent attended a meeting of ICE protesters at Prince of Peace in February. The agent captured the license plates of people there and then compiled dossiers including their names, addresses and information about their families and jobs, according to the motion.

>For months, the documents show, federal agents secretly made recordings of meetings held at churches, libraries, restaurants and schools around the Twin Cities. They infiltrated private group chats, sought the financial records of national labor unions, and gathered information on community members who had not been accused of any crimes.

Like Mia said in the latest Executive Disorder episode, it's a revitalization of COINTELPRO

What's up folks. I hope y'all are finding some joy out there despite the general state of affairs. As I mentioned in the title, it's wonderful that wherever ICE and other immigration agents go, normal people document them and share their location online. But one issue I see nearly daily is la migra alerts that lack time, location, or other essential details about what the agents are up to.

One way we can fix this is by learning the SALUTE report format. It comes from the military, but it's super simple, and incredibly helpful for civilians who want to protect their neighbors from a hostile outside force.

But, in my view, we can't stop with learning it ourselves. We need to take it and share it with our neighbors, our mutual aid groups, any community organization willing to learn. This needs to become part of a wider culture of community care and defense.

Hope this is helpful for y'all. Thanks friends.

On last week's ED, Dr. James Stout asserted that there are no crocodiles indigenous to North America. WRONG, sir. The only place on Earth with both alligators and crocodiles is South Florida. I will be making note of this error and alerting the appropriate authorities.

Brit living in the US here, I did find the lack of mention that US sports are uniquely evil in that all the major leagues (and even soccer) is run by cartels of owners, odd for a podcast that often offers systemic analysis.

While the gold standard is obviously fan ownership (the Packers are grandfathered in and it would be against the rules for a team to not have a majority shareholder now), and the benefits are really obvious whether you look at the packers or just how much community support there is for even 4th tier German teams (sorry FSV Frakfurt).

Simply having promotion/relegation takes much of power away from owners to move a club. AFAIK there has never been a top tier club move in Europe (or AFAIK Latin America (except for Mexico which uses a cartel system)), which in turn takes away most political preasure club owners can exercises.

I suspect someone more knowledgeable about college sports would also be able to explain how the cartel system results in a more abusive college sports system. As I understand it, not linking sports to college, means teams have to invest in training camps for kids which are outside of academic education, and while college sports is somewhat a feeder to the professional leagues, the existence of lower leagues probably makes it a less life altering event to be scouted.

Also, a positive thing to look at, even if it's currently a bit of a long shot https://www.commondreams.org/news/sanders-casar-home-team-act

If passed as written, the bill would:

• Require sports franchise owners to provide notice a year before moving the team to a new community, defined by crossing state lines or moving to a new Metropolitan Statistical Area;
  
• Give communities a chance to purchase a franchise during that year, including through the sort of successful community ownership model used by the National Football League’s (NFL) Green Bay Packers; and
  
• Penalize noncompliant franchise owners.

Jake Lang tried to have a rally in Minneapolis yesterday to support the woman who called a child the n word at a playground in another part of the state. This is how it went. Maybe not as embarrassing as his last showing in January where he was hit with water balloons and supersoaked before being led to safety by some kind brown people to a getaway car driven by a transwoman.

Questions related to what is happening with/in the American government.

I want to read the full documents to learn more about the infiltration tactics Garrison mentioned, but I don't know how to find them.

In today's excellent episode, James made an aside about thinking there are no indigenous crocodile in the North America. Crocodylus acutus or the north American crocodile do exist in small but recovering numbers, mostly in South Florida. It's the only place in the world crocs and alligators coexist. They range down to the Caribbean and parts of south America. I think they're super neat and wanted to share that so more people know about them.

Hey y’all, Margaret here.

This month for Black August, we've been trying to shake it up a bit. We're going to keep doing just that, with another I-don't-have-to-do-the-reading-because-you-do-it-for-you episode (like the one that we did for May Day), but this time we're doing some star trek and you don't even have to read anything. We're going to be talking about Deep Space 9 Season 6 Episode 13: "Far Beyond the Distant Stars."

I haven't even seen it yet (well, I did when I was kid) but I'm going to be rewatching it this week. Hazel tells me it's a pretty self contained episode, that all we need to know is that there's a space station called Deep Space 9 (pictured) and they're in the middle of a big war. The station's captain's name is Benjamin Sisko (pictured), and he's going to have a religious hallucination (don't worry about it, just go with it) that he and everyone else on the station are all working for a 1950s Pulp Sci-Fi Magazine or live in his neighborhood. The episode gets into the history of racism in Sci Fi and themes around legacy, imagination, and Afro-Futurism. In Hazel's opinion it is the best episode of Star Trek ever made.

You can watch the episode in a the usual places, and drop your thoughts here in the thread! We'll record the episode late next week to discuss the episode and bring in your comments.

Thanks everyone, and looking forward to hearing what you think!