President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

I've posted this each President's Day for quite some time but have found no reason to adjust the rankings.

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He was so famously incorruptable that he continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."  I highly recommend his biography Man Of Iron.

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D. 

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2. 

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, re-instituted segregation in the Civil Service, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  He also rounded up a bunch of Americans and sent them to Concentration Camps.  But they were nice Concentration Camps - well, we're told that by his admirers.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 5% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet. 

A Libertarian Valentine's Day

LOL.

LOLOLOLOL. 

Joe Bonamassa & Beth Hart - I'll Take Care of You

It's been a while since I posted Blues on Thursday.  Mea maxima culpa.

So here's what may be the Platonic Ideal of a Blues Ballad.  If you don't like the Blues but you do like Pink Floyd* then you'll like this.

 

* A band with deep roots in the Blues. 

Secure Your Home Network: Moving to Linux - kicking the tires

OldNFO has an important post about how Microsoft is moving very aggressively to a 100% online subscription licensing model.  This is important enough that I won't excerpt any of this; instead, you should go read the whole thing.  It's not too  long, but if you care about the security of your home network (especially the whole who has access to my data and can I even know thing), go read.  I'll wait.

What this means is that you don't own any Microsoft software.  Sure, you may think that because you paid them money (most often when you bought your computer - some of that purchase price went to Microsoft in the form of a license fee for Windows).  But you actually don't own "your" copy of software.  At all.

Rather, you have the right to run the software on your computer.  That may not seem like a big difference, but it is.  The license agreement (you know, the one you didn't read before you clicked "I Agree") allows Microsoft to change the terms of the agreement at any time, at their pleasure.

Microsoft has just done this in a big, big way.  Key new stuff in Windows 11 is:

• AI integrated with your operating system
• Online presence is critical for lots of Windows now (e.g. AI)
• Windows will nag you until you put all your data online (OneDrive) whether you want to or not. 

The proper technical term for that first bullet point is that your Windows operating system is essentially now an "AI Agent" which if you are a regular reader you know is very, very bad security juju.

Combine this enormous security hole with the requirement to essentially be online 100% of the time (bad security) and the liklihood that OneDrive will slurp all your data to some Internet black hole in a Microsoft data center, Windows is simply unsecurable.

Yes, I know that is inflammatory, but there is simply no way that you can get assurance that your security is sane.  I say that as someone who has spent decades inn Internet Security (and particularly in security assurance).  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't think that I could get decent assurance that things aren't going "bump in the Net".  For most of the readers here, it's not even worth trying.

So what do you do, assuming that you are not a tech nerd like me?

Interestingly, Microsoft has just flipped the technical script on this.  It used to be that it was easier to stay on Windows than to move to alternatives like Linux.  Now that's out the window, at least if you want to protect your data from that OneDrive vacuum cleaner and whatever the AI agent will do to you. 

But this is admittedly a big step for a lot of people.  So as it turns out, you can "kick the tires" on all the different flavors of Linux without installing it.  All you need is a web browser. 

This is really slick.  The Linux equivalent of the Windows Start Menu lets you try all the apps (I use the Office apps which are every bit equivalent to Word and Excel, etc, and will save files in Microsoft format like .DOCX).

Take a few weeks poking around, you will likely see that it's not a big learning curve.  

An interesting perspective on AI

Long time Internet Security guy Fred Cohen has some interesting thoughts on how AI can be less obnoxious [PDF]:

The nature of the problem (I think) is that the attempts at safety reflect the behavior of the people who programmed and trained the AI engines, and they are apparently snarky, obnoxious twits that think its better to argue about meta issues than to serve their customers, like me, with the real capabilities they have developed. 

Their version of safety is the opposite of mine. If you want children to be safe from AI, don’t let them use it. 

If you want adults to be safe from AI, don’t make it available. 

If you want a ship to be safe, don’t put it out to sea… but that’s not what ships are for. We trade the utility for the safety, and while making ships that leak like a sieve is a bad idea in my view, making ships that don’t sail is a fruitless effort.

... 

Solution 

The solution is to put someone in charge of these mechanisms in these companies who is not a snarky, obnoxious twit… and I hope this doesn’t exclude me from the candidate pool. 

There are also some rather direct solutions to the problem of providing information to people where the information is not something that should be provided to anybody as a matter of policy. The most obvious solution is not to incorporate any of that sort of policy-violating information in the learning process. 

Of course the snarkiness is the same problem. If you don’t teach the LLM to be snarky by feeding it snarky crap, it will probably not behave that way. It’s no different than a child brought up by respectful parents vs. disrespectful parents. They learn from their teachers. 

Conclusions 

If you don’t want trouble, stop asking for it. If you teach a dog to bite, you are unlikely to be successful at later telling it not to. If you train an LLM with views of pedophiles, fraudsters, and murderers, you are unlikely to get it to not carry that behavior through later on. 

I think that Fred's entirely correct here (note that we ignore the very serious problem of AI Hallucinations here). AI training is generally crap layered on top of the hallucination engine*.

But I wonder if this is an opportunity for AI companies?  If you did a better job training the AI to be well-behaved (like you'd do with your kids or your dogs) would you have a different - and more attractive AI offer?  How about politeand wellbehavedAI.com?  That's a branding that would stand out from all the others.  You could market it to parents worried about their kids, or to old fuddy-duddies like me who hate everything about AI?

I smell a billion dollars of venture capital here ... 

* It seems very likely that the AI algorithms cannot be prevented from hallucinating. 

Word

Quote of the Day goes to B, who hits center mass:

50 years from now, no one is gonna bother to restore an electric Mustang to collect or drive.

Just sayin’.

Yup. 

Ronnie Dunn - Cost Of Livin'

Farewell to the Washington Post.  Journalists never cared when mills across the land shut down and people and towns were wiped out; now it's wailing like the End Of The World by journalists, for journalists.

I'm having trouble summoning up sympathy.  Welcome to the club, pal.

Elon's city on Mars

This is a fascinating breakdown of the (quite serious) engineering problems facing SpaceX as they attempt to build a Mars city. 

Deap sea video of German Battleship Bismark

Last year a company called Magellan sent a deep sea rover 15,000 feet down to the site of the final resting place of the battleship Bismark, sunk 86 years ago.  The video is simply spectacular.  Here is a shortish excerpt with commentary. 

And since we're talking about the Bismark, this song is obligatory.