Conn McQuinn

@connmc.bsky.social

7256 Followers 1154 Following

Science, technology, and neuroscience educator, mostly retired but still kibitzing. Into cartooning, maker spaces, and storytelling. And because life demands it, politics.

Two headlines, the first one reading “White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted” and the second reading “Trump posts a doctored photo of the Obamas and Air Force One with graffiti spray-painted on it.”
Image from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, with new text: I do not like it, Sam-Alt-Man. I do not like Your AI scam
With respect to the war in Gaza. President Biden and I are working around the clock. Because now is the time to get a hostage deal and ceasefire done. Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity. Security. Freedom. And self-determination.
CLAIM 4 concerns the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which is commonly used to give voting systems two hours of backup power. Supposedly, a conspiracy of political operatives has enabled one model, Eaton Tripp Lite, to hack voting machines. This claim has several problems. First, only Dominion voting systems use that UPS, as one of five choices, and it may be chosen rarely because its rack-mounted design is not a good fit for polling places or small counties. ES&S (used by Rockland County) and the other voting systems do not use it. Second, these devices are not special to elections. They are standard products that anyone could purchase at an electronics store and examine for themselves. Third, even if a UPS device was malicious, it doesn’t automatically follow that any connected device is instantly hacked. This is a crucial step that is never explained. It’s just magical hacking.
Image of a candle on a mailbox casting light on bare tree branches around it.
(Continued) What they call death & void, We know is breath and voice: In the end, gorgeously, Endures our enormity. You could believe departed to be the dawn When the blank night has so long stood. But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good.
Sketch of Trump-like figure standing next to a soldier dressed in fatigues. Above the figures, the Trump figure is labeled "Gives illegal order" and the soldier is labeled "Disobeys illegal order." Below the Trump figure is labeled "Traitor" and the soldier is labeled "Patriot." A caption below the sketch says "Just so we're clear."
Video of demonstrators waving signs and flags, viewed through the window of a car.
Picture of flag and sign waving demonstrators on both sides of a busy street.
This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. (Applause.) This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. (Applause.) This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it. (Applause.) And this is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We do not encourage violence. We are still an America that believes in honesty and decency and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, possibilities.
Image of muscular bearded man with lots of chest hair.
Image of July 21 Seattle Times, page A12. The top two headlines read “ChatGPT learns to shop, make PowerPoints” and “Meta built a data center nearby, then their water taps went dry.” The second article is illustrated with an aerial photo of a farm set in acres of grass and forest, with a new, huge data center complex looming nearby.
Quoted text: Overhyped 'AI' technologies, such as chatbots, large language models, and related products, are just that: products that the technology industry, just like the tobacco and petroleum industries, pump out for profit and in contradiction to the values of ecological sustainability, human dignity, pedagogical safeguarding, data privacy, scientific integrity, and democracy. These 'AI' products are materially and psychologically detrimental to our students' ability to write and think for themselves, existing instead for the benefit of investors and multinational companies. As a marketing strategy to introduce such tools in the classroom, companies falsely claim that students are lazy or lack writing skills. We condemn those claims and reassert students’ agency vis-à-vis corporate control.
Photograph of hundreds of people with signs stretching up Pine Street in downtown Seattle.
Picture from Dr. Seuss book “Green Eggs and Ham” with changed text reading “I do not like it, Sam-Alt-Man, I do not like your AI scam.”
Screen capture of a block of text: Those familiar with the technology also point out that the kind of fraud people fear would require someone to breach the security of thousands of individual machines across the country. “Hacking voting machines on a scale that would have national impact would require coordination across multiple states, (plus) knowing the details of their particular machines and voting processes and so many other factors,” explained Chris Nelson, a principal DevOps engineer with an interest in coding and hacking, specifically in election security. “A conspiracy that size that is successful and undetected is really hard to comprehend.” Nelson has over 25 years of experience in network security and RF hacking, which involves Wi-Fi, and has attended multiple DEF CON conferences, the annual hacker convention that focuses on cyber security. Since 2017, a feature of the convention has been the Voting Village, where hackers explore different aspects of election security and report vulnerabilities they find. “Why hasn’t (election tampering) been done widespread? I think for a few reasons. Physical access to the machines is controlled tightly and the multiple well-thought-out fail-safes, like physical ballot auditing,” Nelson said.
Graph showing dramatic upswing in approval of Republicans for Vladimir Putin, a 45-point rise between July 2016 and November 2016.
Text from screen capture of article conclusion: Trump’s social media post was another sign that the president has essentially been publicly negotiating with himself on tariffs. He’s started, paused, tweaked and then threatened more import taxes, constantly reversing himself while balancing his promises to address inflation with his claims that tariffs can tilt the global economy in America’s favor. Bylines:JOSH BOAK, Seung-Min Kim.
A photograph of a girl facing away from us, gazing into a forest. Text over the image reads "We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think." Attributed to Antonio Damasio.
Two side-by-side images. Left image of Representative Moore posing in front of CECOT cage in El Salvador, right image of Himmler and Nazi officers viewing prison camp prisoners through a fence, with Representative Moore's head photoshopped onto one of the officers.
Photo of Representative Moore standing in front of prisoners in El Salvador paired with an image of Nazi officers looking at prisoners behind a fence, with Representative Moore photoshopped into one of the officers.
Photograph of Norwegian politician Vikdun Quisling, who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. The image has the text "quisling" across the top, and the definition "A person who helps an enemy that has taken control of his or her country" across the bottom. The text is credited to dictionary.cambridge.org.
Photoshopped image of Bernie Sanders in his famous mittens sitting atop an Abrams tank.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly.
Quote from Teddy Roosevelt in the Citizenship in a Republic. The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the persecuted.
Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation. —Jason Stanley There are differences between Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and their various nationalist descendants. —Josh Jones
Photo of Teddy Roosevelt with quote. "We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism... Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the state, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. From Citizenship in a Republic
Image from "Green Eggs and Ham," with the eggs and ham replaced by a laptop with the OpenAI logo on the screen. The text reads "I do not like it, Sam-Alt-Man, I do not like your AI scam."
Quote from Teddy Roosevelt in Citizenship in a Republic: "That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country…But the man who, having far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both of body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own."
"We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think." Antonio Damasio. Quote written over image of girl facing away in a forest.