In space,

no one can hear Donald Trump compulsively lie and crassly insult everyone every day.

   

 

UPDATE

I will definitly watch.

The Apocaloptimist?

This morning I read an excellent lengthy New Yorker article (see below) prior to heading out to a noon dental appointment.

 

Interesting. Recall my prior post feauturing Laurie Segall interviewing Sam Altman. In the wake of her interview, I felt a little bit better about Altman. Then comes the NY'er piece.

 

Then, this afternoon after I got back home I ran across Kara Swisher's podcast featuring Tristan Harris. (I cited Tristan last year, BTW.)

 

Some preparatory reading: "The Intelligence Curse."

More tomorrow. I'm tired, my mouth hurts, and I'm just gonna sip some red, watch the NCAA Div I Men's Hoops Final and crash.

 

UPDATE

 

 

Watch / listen carefully.

 

AND, OF COURSE, TODAY WE AWAKE TO THIS SHIT

BACK ON TASK. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

 

 

OK, turns out that this documentary is up on my NetFlix (run time ~91 min). I'm well into it. Excellent. I was already quite aware of many of the issues set forth, but this film is proving well worth my time.

 

And likely yours. 

 

More to come...

2026 Presidential Easter Address to the Nation

 

April 6 UPDATE: Trump held a 90 minute Pentagon Presser today. An incoherent ramble of obscene self-glorification I will not abet it with a YouTube link. Suffice to give you this 2x mp3 sudio excerpt.

PanDigicon update

Jacob Ward is killin' it of late.

    

From his Substack.

"A federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco accuses Perplexity AI of embedding tracking software that transmitted users’ private conversations to Meta and Google — even when users had specifically enabled the app’s Incognito mode, which explicitly promised not to track data. The complaint, Doe v. Perplexity AI Inc. (3:26-cv-02803), names all three companies as defendants and alleges violations of California privacy law.

 
The actions alleged are both ugly and, unfortunately, very common. According to the complaint, trackers download onto a user’s device the moment they log in, giving Meta and Google full access to everything typed into Perplexity’s search interface — before the query even reaches Perplexity’s own servers. This allegedly includes not only email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, and device information, which Meta and Google can theoretically pair with names and home addresses to specifically identify them. It also, according to the suit, includes the text of the exchanges between the users and the AI. The Incognito mode that Perplexity described as creating “anonymous threads” that “expire after 24 hours” offered, according to the suit, no actual protection at all.

 
It is industry practice to embed analytics code like what’s described in the suit to improve performance and offer a tailored experience. But the idea that the code could also be delivering the content of the conversations is new, and a clear violation of what people would reasonably expect..."

The "PanDigicon?" Bentham's "panopticon" for our time. Man, my privacy gumshoe stuff in now so dated. Started my privacy ranting in grad school 30 years ago. 4th Amendment scruples today? How quaint.

 

I still try to stay abreast. See expanded riff here as well.

 

  
Jacob Ward is hugely worth your time. Subscribe to his stack.

 

This just came to my attention. Too much goin' on right now. More in a bit... 

Declaration of Independence 2.0, 2026

April 2, 2026
 

Google Gemini: “Take the July 4, 1776 US Declaration of independence and rewrite it to declare U.S. independence today from Donald Trump.”

 

The 2026 Unanimous Declaration of 
 the American People.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the political bands which have bound them to a leader who has abandoned the principles of the Republic, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, with government deriving its power only from the consent of the governed. When government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

The actions of Donald Trump constitute a history of repeated injuries and usurpations aiming to establish tyranny over these States. Facts demonstrate that he has:

• Assumed excessive authority for military actions.
• Circumvented Congress to control election funding and state functions.
• Obstructed justice by dismissing officials upholding the law and challenging the Presidential Records Act.
• Attempted to challenge fundamental constitutional rights, such as birthright citizenship.
• Disregarded the will of the public.

Therefore, we, the People, declare that these United States are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent; that we are Absolved from all Allegiance to Donald Trump, and all political connection between us is dissolved.

CODA

 

The most powerful "man" on the planet, a person with the unilateral authority to violently end humanity, is obsessed with lame, crude juvie insults.

 

Where are things now in the AI market?

 Can we even know?

 

 

Hmmm...

 

 

AI Bubble-burst drawing nigh?

 

Trump's Iran debacle certainly is not helping matters. 

 

TWO NEW READS UNDERWAY

 

 

 

SEBASTIAN MALLABY

This book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it’s a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand, it tells the story of his quest to build remarkable machines: systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. At some point in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence will beat human intelligence at almost every mental task, and to say this marks a watershed would be a parody of understatement. Artificial intelligence heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought, some seventy thousand years ago. 

I first met Demis Hassabis, the remarkable human, in the mid-2010s: an elfin figure with dark hair falling forward toward angular eyebrows, his face framed by standard-issue spectacles. Already a star technologist and the possessor of a comfortable fortune, he seemed much younger than his thirty-eight years. Smooth-skinned, slight of build, he came across as a phenomenally articulate youth rather than a staid adult. He would appear onstage at conferences dressed in a boyish crewneck and loose slacks. “AI is the technology of making machines smart,” he began one typical performance in 2015, stating his premise in the plainest form possible. 

What he said next was what got your attention. Hassabis embarked on an explanation of his life’s purpose: the pursuit of machine superintelligence. Growing up in North London, he had decided that two fields of inquiry stood out: physics and neuroscience. Physics explains the external world, from the behavior of particles to the functioning of the universe. Neuroscience explains the internal world—the neurons and synapses and electrical pulses that constitute intelligence. Later, at some point in his twenties, Hassabis had concluded that neuroscience was the more important of the two: The internal trumped the external. Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality. 

Still speaking plainly, as though he were saying that he’d wash the dishes after lunch, Hassabis invoked the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. 

“The mind interprets the world,” Kant had declared. 

“It’s the mind that creates our reality around us,” Hassabis now said, by way of emphasis. 

The question was how to comprehend intelligence. Here Hassabis pivoted to a second intellectual giant, the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. “What I cannot build, I do not understand,” Feynman famously remarked, and Hassabis clicked on a controller in his hand to display a slide of the great physicist. Following Feynman’s dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog: a machine that mimicked human thinking. AI’s practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern. The youthful figure on the stage wanted “to understand our own minds better.”…

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. xiii-xiv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

MATT KAPLAN 

Just as Galileo endured because of the kindness of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, so too did Mary because of the kindness (and ferocity) of Jack, and Carl Woese because of the support of Ralph Wolfe. Just as Lister’s students helped him to survive, so too did David help Kati when times were tough. Just as Michaelis bravely tested Semmelweis’s ideas when he was being attacked, so too has Prasenjit Dey tested Betsy’s findings in his own lab and made remarkable discoveries. 

That might all sound very poetic and idealistic. To a certain extent, it is. There is no getting around the fact that the systems within science need to be altered in a manner that reduces competition and nurtures creativity. Reform must happen. With that said, we are creatures with a love of stories. Since the first tales were told around fires, we have loved our heroes and fondly dreamed of stepping into their shoes. Those instincts have not changed. This is something that we must take advantage of. 

Science journalists, myself included, have a long history of reporting the latest scientific discoveries. This is important, but it is no longer enough. If we want to change the way scientists behave, we need to talk more about heroes both in the pages of books like this one and within the science sections of newspapers like The Economist. We need to be shouting the stories of scientists who are doing the right thing from the rooftops. When they call out fraud, refuse to be manipulated by perverse incentives, and support those with unorthodox ideas in their communities, we need to celebrate their actions. We have done a good job with Kati, but there are so many more people out there whose heroics remain unknown. We need to find them. We need to prioritize telling their tales. We need to do this. Now.

Kaplan, Matt. I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right (pp. 232-233). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Sebastion came to me via an Atlantic article. Matt via a new book review in Science Magazine. The Infinity Machine goes to current digitech issue, as explored by Laurie Segal above with Sam Altman.I Told You So is predominantly a work of science history focused in particular on the overlapping socioeconomic / cultural-political ramifications of the science domain across millenia.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

    

The Paddington Road Greycare Center is fully staffed and fully attended today. Meee-mo & Pop on duty. Baltimore city schools are closed today in observance of Passover, so Calvin has an off day. He’s assisting with little brother Arlo. 

apropos, 

 

"Pop, can I use your iPhone?"—Calvin

 

'eh?

 

See Science Magazine:

Digital child safety at the frontier: From evidence to action

The Oaf of Office, April 1st update

   
Oops. 

 

I listened to this live. The Solicitor General did not have a good day. While the SCOTUS decision properly should be a 9-0 slam dunk, I'd speculate a 7-2, with Thomas and Alito dissenting.

 

UPDATE: Jus' sayin'...

 

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

Oaf of Office live TV Address to the Nation draws nigh. We're all thrilled...

   

2x audio mp3 feed.

"NSFW?" We're gonna need a new acronym.

How about "TSFAIU?"

    

Totally Suitable For the AI Unemployed.™

 

CBS is going all Sinclair / Fox Lite. CNN isn't far behind. MSNOW? ABC? Wouldn't surprise me. Print media? I've been a WaPo subscriber for decades. Not any more, in the wake of Bezos' gauche craven suckups to Trump. Still hanging with the NY Times for now, and my subscribed periodicals: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Wired, Science (AAAS), and Scientific American.

 

A new independent entrepreurial public affairs news market is emerging. Mostly podcast-ish, and that gawdawful chaotic Substack platform (ugh).

 

Watch / listen intently to the above Kara Swisher-Scott Galloway Pivot episode. Wickedly funny (incl NSFW) and deadly serious & analytically cogent. Potential #1 for our nascent TSFAIU demographic. Think abut it. (Pull it up in native YouTube, and read the voluminous comments that people have left. Lots of thoughtful, topically astute viewers. By no means a FanBoy/Girl love fest.)

 

Other potential contenders? Jacob Ward? Laurie Segall? Numerous others.

 

Think about it. 

 

More shortly... 

The Oaf of Office, March 31st Update

 

"Completely obliterating." Wafts of War Crlmes, anyone?

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.” —Donald Trump, to The Financial Times of London

39 years ago, during a 1987 televised ABC 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters, Donald Trump advocating invading Iran to "take the oil."

 

Today...

"The end of social media as we know it?"

Jacob Ward in discussion with Nita Farahany.

 

 

In the wake of the New Mexico and California civil liability verdicts.

 

 

"The end of social media?" I guess we'll see. 'Not anytime soon' would be my speculation. Good discussion. I've cited both Nita and Jacob before.

 

My Grandson Calvin at 13 months, LOL.
He is now six. "Hey, Pop, can I use your iPhone?"

  

Baby brother Arlo, last week, 5 months.

Couple Jake and Nita's discussion above with that of Laurie Segall and Becky Kennedy in the prior post. Lotta good stuff to ponder. 

apropos...

ON DECK, COMES OUT MARCH 31ST:

 

Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.

Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.

No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.

Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

See "The man who thought he could keep AI safe." 

_______ 

 

CODA: GRATUITOUS MUCKING AROUND ON MY BLOG

 

Amid Donald Trump's recent nearly 2-hour long televised White House Cabinet Meeting, at 38:14 he launched into his trademark random mumbling grievance ramble. It lasted a little over 19 minutes. I had it up on my iPad via a YouTube feed. At one point I gripped the screen tightly with one hand while holding it at an angle. It went into 2x speed mode (without going into "Chipmunks"). It was funny, so I launched my voice memo app and re-rolled the video. After I got a decent audio take, I dropped the ensuing .mp4 file over to my Macbook, pulled it up in Garageband (I also have Logic Pro, but this was easier), clipped off the front and end loose matter, and exported it to an audio .mp3. I mounted it here, below. The dude is unreal.

Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 mid-cabinet meeting rant, 2x speed

The launch of Laurie Segall's "Mostly Human" podcast

 

A whlie back I cited the work of CNN / 60 Minutes alum Laurie Segall. She has just launched her "Mostly Human" podcast effort (permanent link in my right-hand links column).

 

First up: "Parenting at the Speed of AI." 

 

The guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, clinical psychologist. 

 

Useful to re-visit my prior topically relevant cite of Dr. Jonathan Haidt here. 

 

As a doting grandfather / great-grandfather, I have keen familial interest here, especially in light of paradigm-shifting recent Big Tech social media rulings in the courts.

 

 

ERRATUM

From my book stash. I cited it in 2021. A fine read.

Play breeds better thinkers

In a digital, global world where information is projected to double every 12 hours (1), the memorization of facts will become less of a commodity than the ability to think, find patterns, and generate new ideas from old parts (2, 3). Thus, a cradle-to-career approach to educating children must be mindful of how children learn to learn, not just what they learn (4). Combining insight, scientific acumen, and exquisite narrative, The Intellectual Lives of Children allows readers to peer into the minds of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as they explore and learn in everyday moments, emphasizing what constitutes real learning.

Children are bursting with playful curiosity. By age 3, they ask questions about everything they see—Why does a tree have leaves? Why does the Sun come up each day?—and by age 5, they pose even deeper questions, about God and morals. These questions not only provide fodder for knowledge, they help children discover the causal relationships among things—all with adult mentors by their side… 

TOTALLY ABSURD OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

    

Opened my email this morning. Always love a good laugh.

   

 

OK neuro-nitwits, I left Las Vegas in 2013 to return to the SF Bay Area. Then moved to BMore 7 years ago. Don't quit your Thailand day jobs (btw, note that I pulled it up in Photoshop and quickly smudged the lower-right Q-Code).
 

More shortly...

I am rarely at a loss for words.

Rarely.

The coming Christian Nationalist Surveillance State?

This stuff is heavily intertwined with the increasingly militant patriarchal, mysogynistic "Christian Nationalism" movement (link to prior posts). These people are obsessive where it comes to outlawing abortion and otherwise eliminating reproductive rights.

 

Jus' fer grins: Search "Atwwod" on my blog. 

 

A couple of relevant new reads:

Just begun reading those. 

Below, I watched this documentary live on CNN last night. They've yet to post it to YouTube. It was outstanding. Detailed, nuanced, forthright.

 

 

Related interview with Pamela Brown:

 

 

BTW, below, you may be aware of the Fundie religious activism of our Secretary of War.

 

PROFESSOR MICHELE GOODWIN

In the twenty-first century reproduction translates differently across class and race lines. On inspection, examples abound in this context, but assisted reproductive technology (ART) provides a particularly provocative illustration of my point. In that sphere, liberty and risk translate into a multi-billion-dollar industry, where a woman’s reproductive possibilities resemble a candy store of options: freedom to purchase ova and sperm in her local community or across the country and world, in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, cryopreservation of ova, assisted hatching, embryo transfer, day-five blast transfers, and more. This dizzying array of options is mostly unchecked by federal and state regulations, leaving physicians and their wealthier patients to coordinate pregnancies according to personal choices. 

Technology facilitates a degree of leisure associated with some of these practices, as a few options described above are easily coordinated from the comfort and privacy of home. Functionally, then, with the click of a computer button, an intended parent may purchase sperm, rent a womb, buy ova, and select a clinic to assist in the harvesting, implantation, or embryo development processes. For wealthy women (infertile or not), reproductive privacy and freedom are tangible concepts in uninterrupted operation. Noticeably, there is little, if any, state regulation or interference in this domain, despite considerable risks, poor health outcomes, and miscarriages associated with some of these medicines. 

By contrast, recent criminal prosecutions targeting destitute pregnant women illuminate another reproductive space, where the threat of state intervention through punishment and extralegal retribution overarch pregnancies and compromise the physician-patient relationship. In this alternate reproductive realm, public regulation trumps expectations of privacy. Undeniably, in the United States a poor pregnant woman’s reproductive options are deeply constrained and contested. For example, a woman’s poverty and drug dependence or use during pregnancy might result in heightened legal consequences, including the threat of life imprisonment, birthing while in jail, and even shackling during labor, depending on the state in which the pregnant woman resides. 

A poor woman determined to carry a pregnancy to term often unwittingly exposes herself to nefarious interagency collaborations between police and physicians, quite possibly leading to criminal prosecution, incarceration, and giving birth while in highly unsanitary prison conditions, sometimes without the appropriate aid of hospital physicians and staff. But make no mistake, all women should be wary of the political mobilization against reproductive health, rights, and justice. 

Today, it is not uncommon for a headline to feature a tragic story about a woman giving birth alone in a jail, without the aid of anyone, let alone medical staff. This is what happened to Diana Sanchez as she screamed and “writhed on the small bed inside her cell … gripping the thin mattress with one hand,” as she tried frantically to free a leg as the baby was crowning. A Washington Post headline captured her experience this way: “Nobody Cared”: A Woman Gave Birth Alone in a Jail Cell After Her Cries for Help Were Ignored, Lawsuit Says.”

Sadly, these are not outlier incidents, but rather what has bled into the soil of reproductive politics in the United States, which now uses pregnancy as a proxy for punishment, particularly against poor women. The depth of state-sanctioned cruelty targeted toward poor pregnant women seemingly has no boundaries in contemporary American politics…

Goodwin, Michele (2020). Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Preface). Kindle Edition.  

APRIL AJOY

1. America Is the Best 

Once upon a time, a group of the greatest, strongest, handsomest, and manliest men set out on a holy quest. These men fled the tyrannical country of England to start a new country, where they would have the freedom to worship Jesus how they wanted. These great men, who were basically Christ’s disciples 2.0, embarked on a journey to fight for their religious freedom. 

They loaded up on ships that sailed across the ocean on this God-ordained mission. Sure, some may have technically brought enslaved people with them, but it was a different time. And they treated them with the utmost respect, kindness, and love. 

And sure, some people technically already inhabited the new land, but they didn’t really count because they weren’t Christians. They needed Jesus. And the people in the colonies, set up by the righteous men from England, helped these native people have a much better life—because they now had Jesus to comfort them on the Trail of Tears (we don’t really need to talk about that, though, because again, it was a different time). 

Then the big bad godless British people wanted to stake their claim on the new land. But God would not stand for such evil in his new country, so he declared war through his chosen one, George Washington. God supernaturally blessed his troops to defeat the British. Yeah, some people died, and a lot of the British were sort of Christian, too, but it was the price of freedom. And the greatest country the world would ever know was born: the United States of America. 

Okay, so maybe some bad people in the southern part of the country refused to stop owning people and tried to repeat what Americans had just done to the British, but they failed! Because God was on the side of the holiest president of all, Republican Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and ended racism forever. 

Over the next 150 years, America spread this gospel message of hope and freedom all over the world. God blessed our country in every war we ever fought. The Axis Powers of World War I? We beat ’em. Nazis? Really beat them. Vietnam? Uh… not sure but I think we probably won. The Cold War? Tear down that wall. The War on Terror? Mission accomplished. All these victories occurred because America was founded as a Christian nation, and as long as it stayed the most Christian nation on earth, it would continue to be supernaturally blessed. Hallelujah, the Great I Am and Uncle Sam were quite the team! 

This—almost exactly this—is what I wholeheartedly believed about American history for most of my life. I was taught that I was on the side of good, and everything I did was done with the goal of keeping that goodness going for generations to come. 

No one told me about the true, brutal history of Native American displacement and genocide. I vaguely knew about slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK—whose members were largely Christians—and the fuzzy morality of using nuclear bombs. None of that fit the narrative I was taught. The message I received was very simple: America is the best. Period. 

I know now this belief is literally the definition of “nationalism,” which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines as “loyalty and devotion to a nation,” especially with “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations.” 

So… pretty much exactly what I grew up believing. 

Of course, we never used the term “Nationalist.” It was simply called patriotism, and it ranked just below holiness. This is the first tenet of Christian Nationalism: The belief that America has been specially selected by God, and that it has a special place in God’s plan for redemption...

Ajoy, April. Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.

One impressive young woman. Great sense of wry humor.

 

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES

First, a bit of current Jacob Ward. (He is da bomb)

 

Anyone remember "Total Information Awareness?" 

 

Then, Michele Goodwin brings up the issue of forced drug testing of pregnant women of lesser means (disproportionately minorities. Hmmm... See my 297 pg 1998 grad thesis (pdf) on coerced drug testing policies (which was primarily focused on workplace surveillance).

 

Another link to a prior post. "Let Me Be Franks With You."

Lots of reproductive rights insights in her work. Plus this:

BAD FAITH 

I still remember the day I was saved. 

I was 8 years old. I was sitting, as I had sat nearly every Sunday morning of my childhood, in a hard oak pew with my mother and brothers, all of us dressed as respectably as our poverty would allow. As he did every Sunday at the close of services, our preacher stood in front of the altar, flanked by a Christian flag on one side and an American flag on the other, asking who among us was ready to come forward and accept Jesus into their heart. Some Sundays three or four sinners would stumble down the aisle toward salvation; sometimes no one left the pews. When those seeking salvation got to the front, they would huddle down with our pastor, and their voices would drop too low to be heard by those of us remaining in our seats. Very often they would weep. The end was always the same: Our pastor would lift his head and hands up and say the person’s name out loud, and the congregation would join him in rejoicing that one more soul had escaped eternal damnation and joined the fellowship of the church. 

By the day I decided to be saved, I had watched all this happen hundreds of times. I had heard how the streets of heaven were paved with gold and how no death and no suffering would ever be found there. I had heard the thunderous warnings about the burning fires of hell, where the sinners who had been too proud to repent would spend all of their days in torment and isolation. I had heard that all one had to do to obtain immortal life, avoid damnation, and be welcomed into the fold of the faithful was to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. 

It sounded so easy. I had come very close to stepping out into the aisle several times before, but I had shrunk back at the thought of all the eyes in the pews and of the preacher’s booming voice so close to my ear. I was seized with the fear that if I did step out in the aisle, the deacons would shake their heads forbiddingly and send me back, explaining that the offer of salvation was not meant for people like me. 

In all of those hundreds of Sunday mornings, I had never seen anyone who looked like me get saved. We were the only Asian members of our tiny, all-white Southern Baptist church. We were also one of only a handful of Asian families in the entire town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a city whose population was almost evenly divided between white and black. We were a minority even within that minority, as my brothers and I were the biracial children of a Taiwanese mother and a white father. Our father had died when we were young, and my mother was raising the three of us by herself, and I was convinced that our poverty was the first thing people saw when they looked at us, like the mark on Cain’s forehead. 

Church was in many ways a refuge. No one was likely to call me a “chink,” or shout gibberish at me as they pulled their eyelids back into slants, or mock my mismatched, secondhand clothes. Church meant gospel songs, grape juice and tiny tasteless wafers for communion, and a gift-wrapped present with my name on it at Christmastime. But I could never shake the feeling that even in church, we were at best pitied and tolerated rather than warmly embraced. 

I wondered if salvation would change that. 

That day, as our elderly church pianist hammered out the final hymn of the Sunday service, the fear of eternal damnation and the desire to belong to a community won out over my other anxieties. I made my way down the aisle, and, to my immense relief, I wasn’t turned back. That Sunday, I was the one kneeling down before the altar with our preacher, I was the one tearfully accepting Jesus into my heart, and I was the one being presented to the congregation as the newest member of an eternal fellowship, forever and ever amen…

Franks, Mary Anne. The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Function). Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

A quick topical search, 3/25/26 

Google Gemini search: “Surveilling pregnant women”

Surveillance of pregnant women is increasing in the United States and globally, spanning from public health tracking to monitor maternal health outcomes to digital and physical monitoring aimed at policing pregnancy and abortion access. The landscape of surveillance has intensified following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with digital data, medical records, and location tracking increasingly used to monitor or criminalize pregnancy outcomes. 

Center for American Progress +4

Digital Surveillance and Abortion Tracking

• Search History & Data: Internet search histories, location data, and search and browsing histories regarding abortion can be used to infer intent to end a pregnancy. Law enforcement has utilized these tools to track individuals.
• Period-Tracking Apps: These apps store sensitive data on menstrual cycles, sexual activity, and fertility. Much of this data is not protected by HIPAA and is vulnerable to being used by third parties or law enforcement.
• Digital Footprints: Police may use geofence warrants to identify everyone near an abortion clinic, or purchase data from commercial data brokers to track people suspected of seeking abortions.
• Surveillance Technology: In areas where abortion is restricted, technologies like automated license plate readers (FLOCK cameras) have been used to track people traveling for care. 

Center for American Progress +3

Legal and Medical Surveillance

• Criminalization: In some regions, law enforcement is increasingly scrutinizing pregnancy outcomes, such as miscarriages or stillbirths, leading to the investigation of women who self-manage abortions.
• Medical Surveillance: Some hospitals and state agencies have been accused of unlawfully drug-testing and monitoring pregnant patients without their consent.
• State-Mandated Tracking: Certain states have passed laws requiring hotlines or tracking systems that critics fear can be used to identify and track individuals seeking abortions. 

Brookings +3

Public Health Surveillance

• SET-NET: The CDC’s Surveillance for Emerging Threats to Mothers and Babies Network (SET-NET) tracks the effects of health threats (such as Zika, COVID-19, and syphilis) on pregnant people and their infants.
• Mortality Data: The CDC's Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) reviews vital records to understand the causes of pregnancy-related deaths.
• Global Health Surveillance: In low- and middle-income countries, Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) often track pregnancies through regular, intensive community health worker visits. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC (.gov) +2

Impact of Surveillance

• Chilling Effect: The fear of being monitored has led to a "chilling effect," where pregnant people, particularly those in marginalized communities (Black, brown, and low-income), may avoid seeking prenatal care, fear discussing their health with doctors, or fear searching for information online.
• Targeted Communities: Surveillance disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including immigrants and people of color, raising concerns about deportation, family separation, and increased criminal justice involvement.

In some of my more irascible, cynical moments, I've mused "hell, why stop there, Fundies? Why not panoptically/digitally gumshoe ALL women possessing functional ova, lest they indulge in behaviors that might one day 'prove' harmful to a fertilized ovum 'person' inside them?"

Don't think for a second that such would never be proposed.

 

More to come...