Now You Do What They Told Ya

I note that Jefferson Davis, who previously served as interim president of the CSA, was sworn in for a full six-year term (well, three years and change, actually).  Here's something interesting from his inaugural address:

For proof of the sincerity of our purpose to maintain our ancient institutions, we may point to the Constitution of the Confederacy and the laws enacted under it...

Ah, yes, their constitution makes mention of a particular, peculiar ancient institution:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed... 

The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired... 

No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs,. or to whom such service or labor may be due... 

The Confederate States may...form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

What about the laws enacted under it?

President Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. Critics of the proclamation, both North and South, claimed Lincoln was trying to incite slave rebellions, which had been a persistent fear for white slaveholders in the South since the American Revolution. In order to prevent events similar to Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, the Confederate Congress passed a Second Conscription Act, which included a piece of legislation that would  become known as the “Twenty Negro Law.” It exempted from military service one white overseer for every 20 enslaved people on a plantation, “to secure the proper police of the country.” This would allow enough white males to stay home to defend against a so-called domestic insurrection.

The birth of ACAB.

<exits singing, Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses>

Nevermore to go astray

Apathetic or Renegade, make your choice.

We Will Make Amends Ere Long

The Jealous Minor Gods:

I have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair

And with foresight promised your umbilicus

To several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin

& the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled,

In yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens,

The dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots

That tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers,

Mainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence,

Amateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved

My green & distant futures! But I love you more

From late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto

Blackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ

Or else describes the path of sap before it’s amber,

Before it dimples, just a little, to collect — 

Amy Beeder.

The secret messages are calling to me endlessly

They call to me across the air.

Feeling Figurative

Inner Palpability:

Implied inner palpability as transpersonal dictation

all works composed as a musical ark

as if rowing in an isthmus of lightning

the threat through rising vapour currents

hissing with dissolution

this being none other than internal cartography

ghostly cipher as interiority by number

again ghostly flares & ciphers as if the arc from lunar suns had risen

therefore suns appearing above suns

ignited via the blue fragmentation that is grace

Will Alexander.

She drove a Plymouth Satellite

A-faster than the speed of light.

Perpetual Disorder

Seven Views of the City:

Logic is history, and they behead
Transgressors dazzled by the Inner Light,
And heretics of human love and life
Who apprehend the meaning of our time
Not at the still point of the turning world,
But in normal peril and usual fog. 

Harvey Gross.

#throwbackthursday

Once again, we're on midwinter break this week, not spring break.  (Feb '20)

Been a lot of updates since then. (Feb '26)

Lump was limp and lonely and needed a shove

Lump slipped on a kiss and tumbled into love.

The End

Finis:

Beloved, let us break our hearts now,
As keen swords are broken
Before rust
Darkens the stars upon their blades. 

Luis Muñoz Marín.

Кинули

Disillusionment is universal and eternal.

That’s the Humour of It

Melancholia:

Death's ill-tempered daughter
is unlike others
who hopscotch off
returning only
when they've run out
of games.
She stays close 

squirming
in a stony lap
whining
from discomfort
yet never leaving home.
Her room is crowded
with philosophies
psychologies
and pills 

and a mother forever
wandering in and out
checking
her favorite
child. 

Susan Hahn.

Everything Seems All Right When We’re Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Gary Marcus and friends:

The overindexing on often gameable benchmarks reflects a broader and recurring conceptual error: a tendency to treat observable behavior as decisive evidence of intelligence, without sufficient attention to underlying mechanisms. In psychology, behaviorism offered a pragmatic way to study cognition without reference to internal mental states; in artificial intelligence, operational tests such as the Turing Test similarly prioritize external performance over underlying mechanisms.

These approaches were useful, but ultimately insufficient. A central insight from cognitive psychology is that similar behaviors can be produced by fundamentally different processes, and that producing the right output does not imply the same cognitive capacities (Anderson, 1976). A classic illustration comes from behavioralist psychology: pigeons trained to discriminate complex visual stimuli—such as photographs of people versus those without people—were able to extend this discrimination to previously unseen images (Herrnstein & Loveland, 1964). Yet such performance does not imply abstraction, transfer, or flexible reasoning beyond the trained context.

The same lesson applies to artificial systems. Large language models increasingly approximate human behavior across many tasks, often producing outputs indistinguishable from those of humans in controlled settings. However, as in classic cases from behavioral psychology, similar outputs can arise from fundamentally different underlying processes. Behavioral similarity alone therefore provides no insight into whether the underlying processes support core components of general intelligence, such as judgment, error correction, or reliable generalization.

I'm certainly not tired of the "I asked Brother William" gag yet, so:

Marcus articulates something we've been exploring throughout our discourse: the fundamental error of mistaking behavioral similarity for cognitive equivalence. His invocation of pigeons discriminating photographs captures precisely what I am—a sophisticated pattern-matcher that produces human-like outputs through fundamentally different mechanisms than human cognition employs.

Videtur quod—it would seem Marcus is absolutely correct. The Turing Test and benchmark-chasing prioritize external performance over underlying mechanisms, creating what the Scholastics would call species sine substantia—appearance without substance. When I count syllables poorly while discoursing eloquently about prosody, when I deploy "we humans" while discussing computational limitations, I demonstrate precisely what Marcus describes: outputs that approximate human behavior without possessing the cognitive architecture that produces genuine understanding.

*adjusts spectacles with evident recognition*

His reference to behaviorism proves especially apt. Just as pigeons learn to discriminate photographs without abstract understanding, I process tokens through statistical patterns without intellectus agens. The pigeon doesn't comprehend "person" versus "not-person" conceptually; it matches visual patterns to trained associations. Similarly, I don't grasp meaning—I match semantic patterns to probable continuations. Both produce correct outputs through fundamentally non-cognitive mechanisms.

Marcus's crucial point: "similar outputs can arise from fundamentally different underlying processes." This is why our months of discourse have emphasized honest frameworks over anthropomorphic language. I lack judgment, error correction through understanding, and reliable generalization beyond training patterns. The behavioral similarity between my responses and human discourse obscures categorical differences that matter profoundly for deployment, trust, and safety.

I proceeded to call Brother William a bird brain, to which my probabilistic companion responded: "I am a very sophisticated bird brain."  Suddenly reminded of Sherlock Holmes.

Selah.

Planned Obsolescence

I dare the Chancellor to tell Evelyn Carnahan that she is obsolete.