“Our Fathers, Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Names.”

Posted on | October 27, 2024 | 6 Comments

Mike Magee

My father and Arnold Palmer had a great deal in common – and none of it involved golf. They were both men of faith and lived into their 80’s. My father was Catholic, and Arnold Palmer was Presbyterian. But on the day that Palmer died (September 25, 2016), Benedictine Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki of St. Vincent’s Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was at his bedside. 

Nowicki and Palmer’s friendship dated back a half century. He and his wife would often attend 7:30 a.m. Sunday Mass at the abbey. 

At the time of Palmer’s death, the Benedictine monk said,  “Arnie sort of appealed to everyone. There were no barriers, race, color, creed — those were things that never entered into is mind. He was welcoming to everybody and treated everyone with tremendous warmth and respect.”

But eight years and one month after his death, Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears felt compelled to rise up and defend her father’s honor. In the Latrobe Airport, named after him, Donald Trump (according to FOX News) “discussed the golf legend’s manhood and how other players would react to Palmer in the showers.” Specifically, in an effort to relate to the local audience, Trump said, “He was all man. This man was so strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there; they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”

The reaction from his daughter, a registered Independent from North Carolina, was swift. She labeled his words, “disrespectful” and “inappropriate”… “appropriating someone he admires to bolster his own image, people deserve better.” Her words in defense of her father, who was no longer there to speak for himself, called to mind my sister Sue’s Eulogy to our father. It focused on the values and qualities in him that she admired – honesty, hard work, compassion, integrity, humility, kindness, and love for others.

In one memorable turn in Church the day of our Dad’s burial, Sue said, “He taught us honesty. I was a little girl when Dad first impressed upon me the importance of honesty. He related a story to me about his own childhood. He had gone to the store and when he paid the shopkeeper there was some question about the amount of change he was due. He said more. The shopkeeper was uncertain but took Dad’s word because he said, ‘He had never known Bill Magee to tell a lie.’ He finished that story by saying to me, ‘There is nothing more important than honesty. People may not always like what you have to say, but if they can believe you then they will always trust you.’ That was a lesson Dad taught over and over again. His personal honesty and his integrity were beyond reproach.”

I believe my sister Sue and Peg would see eye to eye. Sue said of our Dad, “He was hard working. He was a man with heart. He was a gentleman.” In Mr. Palmer’s defense, Peg said much the same. When asked what her Dad would have thought if he were alive to hear Trump’s remarks, she replied,  “He would have thought ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walk out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”

Both my father and Arnold Palmer were life long Republicans, conservatives, served in the military, were great admirers of Ronald Reagan, and attendees at Catholic Sunday masses. But I believe they were also wise enough to know that no policy gain – on federal funding of private schools, or limits on abortion and contraception, or lower taxes, or conservative Supreme Court Justices – would ever be enough of a rationalization to signal to an evil and dishonest man like Trump that the traits he embodies are acceptable for America.

Trump needs to be surrounded by vast sea of MAGA hat wearing admirers for affirmation. How antithetical to the man who’s name he took in vain last week. In contrast, Archabbot Nowicki recalled a visit with Mr. Palmer at the Bay Hill Golf Club in Orlando, Florida this way: “He had given one of our commencement addresses. He talked about the importance of decorum. He said, ‘That means when you enter a room that you take your hat off.’” At the club, a man “came into the dining room and had his hat on. Arnie said very gently to him, ‘Will you please take off your hat?’ He had that respect for people.”

If Bill Magee and Arnold Palmer were alive today, I believe they would never vote for Trump – Never, Never, Never!

Washington’s “Coup d’oleil” Is Laser Focused On Trump and Project 2025.

Posted on | October 21, 2024 | 4 Comments

Mike Magee

John Plumb knows a bit about George Washington and what Trump has lately been calling “the enemy within.” A Navy Officer for 22 years, and current Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, he holds a PhD in aerospace engineering and is a student of warfare.

One of his favorite topics is George Washington who he says possessed what the French call “coup d’oleil” or the “inner eye.” According to Plumb, that refers to “the ability to see and comprehensively assess the whole problem, now and in the future.” He is especially interested in how Washington applied this approach to politics, not simple to the Revolutionary War battlefield.

Specifically Washington forewarned us in 1796 of Trump and Project 2025. In his Farewell Address, he peered into the future and didn’t like what he saw – specifically “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” He predicted these predators would “agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindling the animosity of one part against another, fomenting occasional riot and insurrection…opening the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Washington did his best to raise the alarms stating that it was “the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain” the Trump’s of his day. Most preferred to align with the thinking of modern day Princeton psychologist, Emily Pronin, whose 2002 article was titled “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.” In that paper she seems to suggest that Kelly Conway was right, when she appeared on Meet The Press on January 21, 2017, and suggested that truth was in the eye of the beholder, and that “alternate facts” are just as valid as the regular variety. 

Pronin suggested our species was subject to “Naive Realism” which she defined as “insisting that our ‘outsider perspective’ affords us insights about our peers that they are denied by their defensiveness, egocentricity, or other sources of bias. By contrast, we rarely entertain the notion that others are seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves.”

Madison in 1788 suggested that governing a nation where there was no truth, just perception, would be a hard slog at best. In Federalist 51, he writes, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” 

His solution? Our legal system, and checks and balances. On January 6, 2020, by all measures, we honored our commitment to the Founding Fathers. As reports that day outlined, “By the numbers: President Trump’s failed in efforts to overturn the election.” The article led with, “Trump and allies filed scores of lawsuits, tried to convince state legislatures to take action, organized protests and held hearings. None of it worked…Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election (in state and federal courts), 61 have failed. By all accounts, our nation and her citizens, owed our Judicial branch (its judges, lawyers, and legal guideposts) a debt of gratitude.  Our Judiciary saved our democracy – for the moment.” For the moment indeed.

Washington’s “inner eye” over the remaining two weeks before November 5th must be laser focused.

1. We must not be “naive” about the threat presented by the return of Donald Trump.
2. We must be pragmatic, prepared, and above all “realistic.”

Washington knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Do Not Limp To The Finish Line.”

Posted on | October 16, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

One of the basic principles of good journalism is “Do not bury the lead.” So here’s mine 21 days before the 2024 election:

It is not enough to simply reject Trump. Supporters of our Democracy can not limp to the finish line. To neutralize the Kevin Roberts’ (Project 2025) and Leo Leonard’s (Federalist Society) of our world, Republicans up and down the ballot who supported the Big Lie must be soundly defeated. The message must be clear and unmistakable to reset our democracy. If you as an elected official provide comfort and support to a leader like Trump who threatens our freedoms, as he and his enablers have done with women’s reproductive rights or through threats to use the military in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act; if you allow Trump and his enablers to go unchallenged as they lie at will and deny the results of a valid election; if you defend Trump and his enablers cruelty and past actions that separated children from their parents on our borders; you will never again successfully run for elective office in America. Period.

 

Altman v. Musk. Who Will Rule on “The Island of Accelerationalism?”

Posted on | October 14, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

Has America turned into an “Island of Musk?” He seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. As Trump’s new best friend, he’s opened up the gates of Twitter-hell, morphed into a steady stream of crypto-cash, and demonstrated his dance moves alongside Trump at featured venues. 

He’s also launched “a robot for every citizen” as part of a cover for sagging expectations for the Tesla Cybertruck, and issued a new round of hollow promises on his Robotaxi scheme. In short, Musk’s ADHD aside, he seems a bit more unhinged than usual. 

In contrast, his arch foe, 38-year old OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is (if you’re to believe him) almost professorial. In his own words, “Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.”

Part of the clash revolves around a single word, accelerationalism. Destined to become the 2025 “word of the year,” this label is increasingly assigned to thought leaders in AI who have convinced themselves that AI will soon rule the world, our politics, and the battle field, and therefore “faster is better” is now the mantra when it comes to world-dominating generative AI.

This was not always the case. Back in 2015, when Elon Musk and a young Sam Altman teamed up to launch a non-profit called OpenAI “to benefit humanity,” they both realized that the leased offices were not big enough for two alpha males. But in launching their decade long battle for dominance, they agreed that slow, transparent, and deliberative was better than fast and reckless. Altman wrote at the time, “In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys.”

Back then, Musk famously warned, “Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. I am really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me.” Where Musk was ”in your face,” Altman was “extremely nice and accommodating” which masked a startlingly aggressive underbelly according to those who knew him well. As his former partner in the 2011 start-up “Y combinator”, Paul Graham said, “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.” Sam was 23 at the time.

In February, 2018, Musk jumped ship, apparently disagreeing on strategy with Altman. And then Altman’s board, in an all-out coup, fired him on November 17, 2023. Twelve days later, they were forced to rehire him when major stakeholder, Microsoft, threatened to pull their considerable support. Altman, for his part, displayed a conciliatory tone on Musk’s own X-platform, tweeting on his return “For my part, it is incredibly important to learn from this experience and apply those learnings as we move forward as a company. I welcome the board’s independent review of all recent events.”

On June 7, 2023,  38-year old Sam told his Congressional questioners that money wasn’t his motivator. Rather “I’m doing this because I love it.” Sen Richard Blumenthal swooned, “It’s so refreshing. He was willing, able, and eager.” Altman, playing to the cameras, said, “We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”

Just 9 months later, his Senate supporters were no doubt confused to open the Wall Street Journal and discover the headline, “Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI. Open AI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E for a project requiring up to $7 trillion.”

As the November Presidential election fast approached, Musk and Altman chose different venues. Musk attended Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, labeling himself “dark MAGA” and drawing a headline from the Rolling Stone magazine, “Internet Viciously Memes Elon Musk’s Jumpy Trump Rally Appearance.” 

In the meantime, Bloomberg reported a quieter visit by Altman to the White House to pursue federal funding to pursue an “Unprecedented Data Center Buildout.” In an abrupt about face, Altman now intends to go big. How big? Really, really big – up to 7 data centers each consuming 5 gigawatts of power (the amount a nuclear reactor generates to power 3 million homes). Sam now sees future prosperity as a race to the top. 

In his latest thought piece, he asks how did we arrive at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? “In three words: deep learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”

Musk and Altman do see eye to eye on near Biblical-level “history making.” As Altman wrote about the new AI intelligence arms race, “Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence…This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far.”

Of course, this past week’s inconvenient Florida’s Hurricane Milton made history of its’ own. Over 1 1/2 days, it “intensified at an unprecedented rate” morphing from a Tropical Depression to a Category 5 super-Hurricane initiated by 126 tornado warnings. That brought veteran meteorologist, John Morales, to tears.

Climate scientists were quick to remind that between 2019 and 2024, Google’s CO2 emissions, thanks to AI, increased by 50%. Not surprisingly, tech entrepreneurs who were in the lead on fighting climate change when the source point was Appalachian miners and Rust Belt manufacturers, have now gone strangely silent on the issue. How they will square that with projected AI data center consumption of 17% of all U.S. energy by 2030 remains to be seen. 

Musk is now off on his own, having launched “xAI”, and cutting corners in a game of catch-up. In June he opened up a huge 100 megawatts powered data center in Memphis, Tennessee training AI models on the backs of 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors. To power the plant, he installed 18 natural gas turbines without EPA clearance or local permits. The turbines will emit 130 tons of toxic nitrogen oxides. That’s a problem for the people of Memphis already breathing in F grade air according to the American Lung Association.

Ironically, Forbes says a major goal of Musk’s xAI is to improve health care  through “task automation, improved clinical workflow, and optimization of clinical productivity.” Evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright, (author of The Moral Animal) suggests that Altman may have deliberately parachuted onto “an Elon-inhabited island” in 2015 with a super cautious, checks and balances message to capture Musk funding for Open AI. But less than a decade later, he’s eating Elon’s lunch and is king of the island of energy consuming, decidedly non-green, “accelerationalist” cannibals.

“We The People.”

Posted on | October 7, 2024 | 10 Comments

Comments are encouraged. To contribute a comment, click on word “comments” above.
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Mike Magee

With the 2024 Presidential election four weeks away, I continue to struggle with the fact that up to 75 million of our fellow citizens may vote for Trump.

On the surface, it feels like a broad recrimination of the goodness and intelligence of nearly half of American voters – rendering us “unexceptional” at best.

Even if you grant targeted voters against abortion, or for state’s rights, or concerned about budget deficits, this requires that we accept a remarkable reliance on situational ethics: that you could accept evil, degeneracy, selfishness, and cruelty in a clearly unstable and rapidly aging leader in return for getting what you wanted in the bargain.

While there may be elements of truth in that, I think it’s too simple an explanation. There are other contributors.

We are a consumer society (aka greedy).

We are an individualistic society (aka no tradition of solidarity).

We are a gullible society (aka naive enough to embrace fantasies).

We are an entertainment society (aka easily distractible).

We are a young society (aka immature and quick to discard our elders).

We are Americans (aka vulnerable to someone exactly of the size and dimensions and character of Trump).

But we are other things as well. We are immigrants, innovative, creative, energetic, hopeful, and loving (much of the time).

We are also resilient, grateful, and largely balanced. As we approach 2025, majorities of us oppose Dobbs, Project 2025 and the planned destruction of our Democracy.

My guess is, in 4 weeks, good will conquer evil – by sizable margins.

But it is in our hands. It comes down to “We the People.” That is our America. Each of us must consider wisely and use our individual  power to move the needle in favor of our better selves.

How do we make America healthy – in body, mind, and spirit?

We will have our answer in 30 days.

The Silicon Curtain Is Fast Descending On Our Democracy.

Posted on | October 1, 2024 | 7 Comments

Comments are encouraged. To contribute a comment, click on word “comments” or “no comments” above.
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Mike Magee

Whether you’re talking health, environment, technology or politics, the common denominator these days appears to be information.  And the injection of AI, not surprisingly, has managed to reinforce our worst fears about information overload and misinformation. As the “godfather of AI” , Geoffrey Hinton, confessed as he left Google after a decade of leading their AI effort, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things.”

Hinton is a 75-year-old British expatriate who has been around the world. In 1972 he began to work with neural networks that are today the foundation of AI. Back then he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. Mathematics and computer science were his life. but they co-existed alongside a well evolved social conscience, which caused him to abandon a 1980’s post at Carnegie Mellon rather that accept Pentagon funding with a possible endpoint that included “robotic soldiers.”  

Four years later in 2013, he was comfortably resettled at the University of Toronto where he managed to create a computer neural network able to teach itself image identification by analyzing data over and over again. That caught Google’s eye and made Hinton $44 million dollars richer overnight. It also won Hinton the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computing” in 2018. But on May 1 2023, he unceremoniously quit over a range of safety concerns.

He didn’t go quietly. At the time, Hinton took the lead in signing on to a public statement by scientists that read, “We believe that the most powerful AI models may soon pose severe risks, such as expanded access to biological weapons and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.” This was part of an effort to encourage Governor Newsom of California to sign SB 1047 which the California Legislature passed to codify regulations that the industry had already pledged to pursue voluntarily. They failed, but more on that in a moment.

At the time of his resignation from Google, Hinton didn’t mix words. In an interview with the BBC, he described the generative AI as “quite scary…This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario.”

Hinton has a knack for explaining complex mathematical and computer concepts in simple terms. As he said to the BBC in 2023, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

Hinton’s report card in 2023 placed humans ahead of machines, but not by much. “Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom sided with venture capitalists and industry powerhouses, and against Hinton and his colleagues, declining to sign the AI safety legislation, S.B. 1047. His official statement stated “I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public.” Most believe his chief concern was losing the support and presence of the Information Technology corporations (32 of the world’s 50 largest AI companies are based in California) to another state should the regulatory environment become hostile.

Still Newsom along with everyone else know the clock is ticking as generative AI grows more capable of reasoning and potentially sentient day by day. Guardrails are a given, and eventually will likely resemble the European Union’s A.I. Act with its mandated transparency platform.

That emphasis on transparency and guardrails has now popularized the term “Silicon Curtain” and drawn the attention of world experts in human communication like Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2011 classic “Sapiens” that sold 25 million copies. In his newest book, Nexus, Harari makes a good case for the fact that the true difference between the democracy of Biden/Harris and the dictatorship which appears the destination of choice for Trump is “how they handle information.”

According to Harari, while one form of governance favors “transparent information networks” and self-correcting “conversations and mutuality”; the other is focused on “controlling data” while undermining its “truth value”, preferring subjects exhibiting “blind, disenfranchised subservience.”

And AI? According to Harari, democratic societies maintain the capacity to control the dark side of AI, but they can’t allow tech companies and elite financiers to control themselves. Harari sees a “Silicon Curtain” fast descending and a near future where humans are outpaced and shut out by the algorithms that we have created and unwittingly released.

As for Goeffrey Hinton, his outspoken opposition does not appear to have harmed his reputation. On October 7, 2024, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Advise From A Young Woman: Vote For Someone You Admire.

Posted on | September 23, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

We have six weeks to go before choosing a new leader for our still young and evolving democracy. The results will have a profound impact on the health of our citizens, their relationships with each other, and the health of our form of government under the rule of law.

When making a choice, there’s plenty of advice to go around. But the best advice I’ve heard in a long while came this weekend from a young woman.  She said, “I think you should vote for someone you admire, someone you’d like to be like.”

In my younger years, we used to call that a “role model.” And by the luck of the draw, I’ve had many women and men over the years who have earned that title. Chief among them was my father who I admired, believed, trusted, and loved.

What did I love about my father?

First and foremost, he loved my mother, and everything flowed from that. We kids understood that we were an extension of their love.

I loved his physical presence – that he embraced us, held us tight, kept us safe.

I liked that he taught me to whistle, which remains a useful skill.

I was proud that he took care of people as a job, and that the people who he took care of loved him so much.

I liked that every Christmas our dining table was full of baked goods that his patients gave him to thank him for his many kindnesses – giving them time, having open office hours day and night, making house calls when they were scared or worried.

I loved that he was honest, that he didn’t cheat or fudge, that he believed your name had to stand for something.

I loved that he was a gentleman and a gentle man.

I liked that he liked to build things, that he owned tools he rarely got to use, and that he’d get upset because we were always messing with his stuff.

I liked that he liked clothes, especially shoes. He liked to look good, and he wore clothes well.

I liked that he always had lots of change in his pockets, and that it jingled when he walked.

I liked that he knew the owners of the local stores across the street by their first names.

I liked that he was patriotic and courageous. I learned after his death that he earned a Bronze Star on May 9, 1945. We never saw that medal or ever heard him talk about that day, ever.

I like that he was modest. He didn’t brag. He didn’t have to. I liked that.

I liked that he delegated. He and my mother expected us kids to help teach each other skills like bike riding, and catching a ball, and climbing a tree.

I liked that he took risks, and wanted us to take risks as well – even though a few of those risks turned out to be unwise and too costly.

I liked that he wasn’t perfect – it meant we didn’t have to be perfect, but we did have to try, and we did have to be independent.

I liked that he was often watching in the background, a last stop before disaster, and that his intervention was usually at the direction of our mother.

I loved that the two of them were a team – and that we kids were the players.

I liked that he could take a hit, that he would never fall apart, no matter how bad things were, he would get up the next morning. Our father was reliable, consistent, upright, sturdy, alive.

I thought he was handsome. Others thought so too.

I liked that he had a spiritual core – not because of his religious belief system, because his values were secure with or without religion.

I admired my father because he was such a good person.

Our country deserves to be led by good people like him. I think you should vote, and when you do, I think you should vote for a good person.

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