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I’ve been reading The Age of Eisenhower a little slower now that I’m not waiting at airports and flying. I’m about 3/5ths finished with it.
Here are four subjects which each merit a Duluth Reader Column:
Eisenhower book
The best thing I have done for my sanity is to have continued pursing my reading of history. The last three books have been particularly salutory and I’ve mentioned them in posts several times recently. As of Monday morning I’ve got four chapters left of the Willcox book or 90 pages left to read out of 527. The last few chapters have been pariticularly revelatory on both the mundane past and the extraordinary nuances I missed as I picked up piecemeal information about these times from not being a daily reader of the New York Times from my birth to ten years of age. The vast gap between competence between both Harry Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower and the pussy grabassing Donald Trump are breathtaking. Its like tippy toeing up to a hole punched through the earth and seeing stars on the other side of the planet such is the abyss Donald Trump has plunged us into.
Forward Party convention in Maplewood, Minnesota, at the Ramsey County Library
I passed several Saturday hours with fifty Forward Party partisans as I took their measure and thought about how I could help them and how they could help me.
One of five candidates or so that they endorsed got me thinking about getting 2000 signatures on a peition to run as a republican against Pete Stauber instead of simply plunking down $300 to get on the ballot. Worthy of comment is Jay Reeves who impressed me simply by demonstrating a simple piece of software for finging financial anomalies in the vast taxpayer funded expenditures of local governments. His website is jayreevesforMN.com
Petitioning for congressional seat
I have done this twice before to get on the ballot but I was younger in 1992 and 2006. Getting 2,000 singlehandedly is a lot of work but as I thought about it this morning it occurred to me that it would be a simple ask to ask friends to find a dozen fellow signatories and ease my efforts while possibly actually building a small support group for my eccentric challenge of a Trumplican traitor to America.
AI and Gerrymandering and
These are two seperate issues but first up AI. I am not interested in taking a position on the subject of Data sites. I sympathize with skeptics who fear that BIG AI will put great burdens on local populations for energy production, water demands and taxes to pay for their profits. But I keep testing, challenging and finding more reasons to hope AI is a positive God Like contributor to human understanding. If I am right and Americans come to that conclusion eventually getting data centers set up will become less controversial. I think we need to train students with AI but before we start that more Americans need to have conversations, test and get to know AI software. I have put several big problems in front of the five AI’s I put on my cell phone and what they can do is breathtaking but in a good way.
To that end today as I contemplated the evil misuse of gerrymandering I put a question to ChatGPT: the answere I got back began very positively mentioning that going back to 1842 there were federal standards which were later dropped. That was only the first paragraph and I stopped reading there to put this together for the Blog. My question was given orally to my cell phone and while it was long it was pretty straight forward: This is it:
I am interested in finding a solution to future gerrymandering on a state-by-state basis. What particularly interests me is looking at some of the old policies in the 50 states that dealt with redistricting and rules that they had in place in the past to make sure that legislative districts were not strange shapes but held fairly true to existing lines, municipal lines, and county boundary lines. Can you give me some insights into how different states managed to keep gerrymandering from becoming excessive in the past that might be applied in the future by federal, state statute that would punish states by limiting resources for states that did not adhere to fair standards of redistricting?
In the next post I will attempt to copy the long reply that began with encouraging historical precedent. Part of the reason I will wait until the following post to copy and paste (if I can) the entire reply is because no sooner had I read the beginning a second question popped into my mind. Knowing I would immediately want to post the initial reply in toto here on the blog I wanted to wait before asking ChatGPT this follow up question:
Follow up question:
If these standards were adopted before the Civil War under our constitution is there any worry that the Supreme Court has found grounds to prevent federal review of state redistricting since the Federal government stopped following these standards?
If ChatGPT can persuade me these standards could be applied again after the 2026 congressional mid term elections it would be tantamount to putting an end to our catastrophically divided government. Thus the answer would be an example of why techies are hailing AI.
