Brian J. Driscoll, FBI patriot

My intent today had been to begin on continuing another topic (AI, evolution, exobiology, sentience/cognition stuff), but then tonight I watched CNN Anderson Cooper 360. Most of the hour was devoted to an interview of former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll—(a decorated 27 yr career FBI veteran). He was summarily fired by Trump's FBI Director Kashyap Pramod Patel (better known lately as K.Edgar.Boozer) in August 2025 in a blatantly illegal act of political vengeance at the behest of Donald Trump.

 

 

More to come...

I could not recommend this new book by Danielle Crittenden more highly.

 

I got onto this via an Atlantic excerpt. Bought it and read it overnight. I totally get it, and I have learned a ton in 2 days. Thank you, Danielle and David.

 

Prior relevant riffs of mine: A Billion Tons of Human Bones. 

The "Accelerationists" vs the "Doomers."

AI For Good?

 

Pending book release. Pre-pub excerpt from The Atlantic.

The Secret to Understanding AI
“Imagine the tech without the tech companies.”
By Josh Tyrangiel

In the before times—before machines could hallucinate, before compute was a noun—it was not uncommon to go several weeks without someone telling me the world was about to end. Similarly, a whole season might pass without anyone assuring me that it was also, simultaneously, about to become perfect.

That particular luxury died on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. What followed was less a news cycle than a weather event—a tropical depression that would not budge. Within weeks, millions of people had their first experience with generative AI. Within months, every major technology company had announced its own version of a large language model, or a partnership, or a pivot. Venture capital arrived drooling. Most people in tech think about money, but AI-profit projections are different—like CFO fan fiction, written in Excel. In 2023, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that $4.4 trillion in annual corporate profits could be up for grabs from generative AI alone. Morgan Stanley estimated $40 trillion more in operational efficiencies. The words artificial intelligence went from obscurity to a constant hum, present in every earnings call, every school-board meeting, and far too many arguments at dinner tables.

Yet for all of the noise, a simple question stayed unanswered: What exactly was this new technology going to do for people? Not for corporations or the billionaires who aspired to become trillionaires, but for people with mortgages and sick parents and children struggling to learn things…

May 12th release date.

AMAZON BLURB
In contrast to the wave of noisy polemics around AI, AI For Good explores how, in practice, it can actually improve our lives and tells the stories of everyday citizens at the forefront of this new “AI entrepreneurship.”

AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to “break shit,” but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better.

Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data. AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done.

This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise.

While the loudest voices in AI debate doomsday scenarios and trillion-dollar market opportunities, this book focuses on those working in the messy, incremental, but deeply impactful space of AI practice. However, there is one big caveat—success is not guaranteed. Change is hard. Institutions move slowly. But even in failure there are lessons for everyone who’s interested in using AI—carefully, thoughtfully—to build a better world today.

I have too many books in play at the moment (about 8), but I'll be adding this to the list when it's released.

 

SOME OTHER READS JUST ADDED TO THE STASH

  

 

Dispatches from Grief is intensely personal for this "Girl Dad."

ERRATUM: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

 

The greatest pitfall in the search for extraterrestrial life—according to science fiction, anyway—is foolhardy researchers somehow bringing aliens to Earth to wreak havoc.

But after decades of exploring our seemingly sterile solar system, real-world scientists today are much more concerned with the opposite problem: The possibility that Earth’s life will escape our planet to contaminate other worlds, sabotaging the quest to find any genuine “second genesis” of biology around the sun. Imagine that a multibillion-dollar robotic mission found wriggling microbes on Mars and that follow-up studies then revealing those “aliens” had DNA and other biomolecular machinery that showed they were emigrants from Earth.

Astrobiologically speaking, we would have met the enemy—and it would be us. Taking a cue from sci-fi, you might call such life-forms “Klingons,” for their presumptive hitchhike to the Red Planet as stowaways in spacecraft sent from Earth.

“Planetary protection” is the term scientists use for efforts to prevent otherworldly invasions of all sorts; to date, most of it has focused on Mars, but the practice applies to all potentially habitable environments within reach of our spacecraft. In the 1970s, for example, NASA did its best to keep its twin Viking landers Klingon-free before launching them to Mars. And if the NASA-led international Mars Sample Return effort ever manages to bring its precious payload back to Earth, the agency will be tasked with quarantining those specimens as if they contain extreme biohazards rather than lifeless bits of rock and soil…

Imagine my surprise. apropos of some prior riffs on astrophysics and exobiology.

 

OFF-TOPIC, CHEERS... 

More shortly... 

Rest in Peace, Sir

Ted Turner

Ted Turner was a very good man.

"AI" Query

 

Well, that first pass took less than 10 seconds.

 

 

 The under-the-hood details slog will surely be "bring a Snickers, you gonna be a while."

 

The NYT tally comprises an A thru Z Trump-spleen-target breakout setting forth every diss by Trump. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Obama alone consume screen page after screen page of crass Twitter jibes.

 

There's probably a book here. The crudities spanning the 59 years of Donald's "adult" life would surely fill volumes. 

 

Anyone recall "Bushisms?" Quaint by comparison. SMH chronic lexical incoherence, to be sure, but nil venom.

Dr. Sherry Turkle, MIT

“Friction is the nature of the human condition.”

    

The Sherry Turkle quote above is from Kara Swisher's wonderful CNN "Live Forever" docuseries (S1.E3). The main topic concerns "loneliness in the age of AI."

 

Yeah, friction, more broadly, is the inescapable condition of life writ large.

 

"EQUILIBRIUM IS DEATH"

A long time ago, here, there, and everywhere else, everything was all together and unreasonably hot. One day, a very, very long time from now, everything will be very, very far apart, and incredibly cold, and nothing will ever happen again. But between those two intervals—on the descent from the Big Bang to the end of time—things can happen. We live in that liminal moment, after the cream has been added to the cosmic coffee, when galaxies convect, the larger swirls begetting smaller swirls, and fractals thread themselves all the way down through creation. But just as the tiny hurricanes of cream in your coffee don’t swirl endlessly over the course of breakfast, this filigree of physical reality—the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the cellular machinery of life—is temporary. It’s endlessly dissipating. In fact, it all exists in the service of getting us as quickly and efficiently as possible to that uniform, universal café au lait at the end of time. Toward tranquility, equilibrium. 

While equilibrium might seem desirable in our own lives, in practice equilibrium is the end. Equilibrium is death. But though the universe as a whole might be straining toward that ultimate end—toward an exhausted state of uniformity and maximal disorder, when everything everywhere is the same temperature, when all debts have been settled, all contradictions have been resolved, and no more work can ever be done again—we still, thankfully, find ourselves far from that final state of equilibrium. The sun still shines, and so we make hay. In fact, we can only ever find ourselves in this brief moment, impossibly early in cosmological history when the universe is still so outrageously far from reaching equilibrium that interesting things can still happen. Life, love, everything we care about—these are all so-called far-from-equilibrium phenomena. And it was in this universal straining toward equilibrium, on a restless young planet, that life emerged. It was here that carbon dioxide was transformed to living matter, and the Earth became the Earth…

Brannen, Peter. The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World (pp. 20-21). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Yeah, that's pretty tangential. True nonetheless. writ large...

 

I've cited Dr. Turkle before.

"FRICTION?" 

 

UPDATE

 

I notice increasing CNN YouTube short vids pumping Kara's dpcuseries. e.g.,

 

 

This shortie goes to the S1.E3 topic—"mitigating loneliness w/out chatbots."

More shortly...