The Mexican drug cartels are a bit "like junior partners to corrupt government officials"

Samo Burja, Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State, Bismarck Brief, May 8. 2024.

As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics.4 The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.

Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.5

But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.

As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

And: "The drug trade is powerful in Mexico not because of its size, but because of its liquidity, anonymity, and informality, which makes it easy to enrich particular individuals."

There's much more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Friday Fotos: Flowers & flowers and more flowers

What HAS AI changed? What WILL it change?

The answers to those questions range between “nothing” and “everything” depending on this and that. What is the scope of the question, earth only, or the whole universe? Are we talking about governing laws or their expression, to date, or through all of time? What are your metaphysical presuppositions, strict physical reductionism or (extravagant) pluralism? At the very least it seems to have changed the number and complexity of the questions we face, the limits of the bounding box of those questions.

Back in 1990 David Hays published what I regard as a foundational article, one of two such articles we have published:

The Evolution of Cognition, Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 13(4): 297-320, 1990, https://www.academia.edu/243486/The_Evolution_of_Cognition

In that article we said:

... there are researchers who think it inevitable that computers will surpass human intelligence and some who think that, at some time, it will be possible for people to achieve a peculiar kind of immortality by “downloading” their minds to a computer. As far as we can tell such speculation has no ground in either current practice or theory. It is projective fantasy, projection made easy, perhaps inevitable, by the ontological ambiguity of the computer. We still do, and forever will, put souls into things we cannot understand, and project onto them our own hostility and sexuality, and so forth.

A game of chess between a computer program and a human master is just as profoundly silly as a race between a horse-drawn stagecoach and a train. But the silliness is hard to see at the time. At the time it seems necessary to establish a purpose for humankind by asserting that we have capacities that it does not. It is truly difficult to give up the notion that one has to add “because . . . “ to the assertion “I’m important.” But the evolution of technology will eventually invalidate any claim that follows “because.” Sooner or later we will create a technology capable of doing what, heretofore, only we could.

That’s a fairly sweeping statement, though I must admit that I’m not quite sure what we meant by it. I’m quite sure that we meant downloading (or uploading) one’s mind really is a projective fantasy. I still believe that. Did we mean that “inevitable that computers will surpass human intelligence” is projective fantasy as well? If that’s what we meant, don’t we contradict that at the very end of the next paragraph? But just what does that mean, that sooner or later we will create a technology capable of doing what, heretofore, only we could? Does it mean that, task by task, problem domain by problem domain, some technology will surpass human performance in that domain, for that tast? Or did we mean that some one technology (the term AGI hadn’t been coined then) will surpass us in all domains?

Who knows?

That article was about the cultural evolution of cognition through a series of ranks, for want of a better word. Each rank was catalyzed by the emergence and maturation of a new cognitive technology. Rank 1 culture was enabled by speech. Writing saw the emergence of Rank 2 technology. Rank 3 technology first appeared in early modern Europe as the result of a conjunction of Arabic arithmetic with European mechanism. The seeds of Rank 4 thinking appear in the 19th century in statistical mechanics and Darwinian evolution and are catalyzed Turing’s abstract conceptualization of computation and von Neumann’s scheme for embodying that conceptualization in physical devices, modern computers.

None of these transitions appears as a step function on a scale measured in years, but rather would seem to follow the pattern of the familiar logistic function of exponential growth up to some plateau. Yet over the long run these curves come closer together. Rank 1 emerged on the order of 100s of thousands of years ago; Rank 2, multiple 1000s; Rank 3, multiple 100s, and Rank 4, within the lifetime of my grandparents or parents, depending on where you locate the starting point (I was born in 1947). Are we now moving around on the plateau of Rank 4, or are we moving toward Rank 5? If the latter, where are we on that curve?

Throughout these various transitions, human biology remains (fundamentally) unchanged while human culture, and thus the conditions of human life, are changed radically. The brains of humans living in different cultures are pretty much the same, but the behaviors and perceptions of which they are capable vary radically. What remains the same with AI and what changes?

There was a period when, for billions of years, the universe consisted entirely of inanimate matter. And then, over a long period of time, life emerged. Was that a fundamental change or not? The laws of physics remained the same, no? [Assuming, of course, that the laws of physics are everywhere the same throughout the universe.] Can the laws of biology be (effectively reduced to the laws of physics. Some say “yes” and some say “no.” But you can see why the question is an important one, no? Does the appearance of AI represent the emergence of new laws? If so, are they laws of mind or laws of matter? If not, does that mean that there is not anything fundamentally new about AI? And yet it may very well change human life as profoundly as writing did 1000s of years ago. Or is it more like the emergences of language 100s of 1000s of years ago? Are humans something fundamentally new in the biological world, or are we merely naked apes?

What of the future? The future consists of events and phenomena that have not yet happened yet. And yet some of them keep slipping into the real at a steady pace, even as I type, even as you read – which is necessarily some time after I type. That implies that that there is a range of events which is in the future for me as I type, but is in the past for you as you read. The more you read, the wider than range becomes. If you stop reading for a moment, does that range take a pause, or is it still widening though you aren’t paying attention?

What of hype? What’s real about the future for Sam Altman may be hype to me. That is, it’s real hype to me, but to Sam, my opinion is flat-out wrong.

AI is somehow mixed up in all this. It really is. No hype.

* * * * *

CODA: The other foundational article: Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 11, No. 8, July 1988, 293-322, https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence

Has Generative AI Already Peaked?

This paper is discussed in the video:

Vishaal Udandarao, Ameya Prabhu, Adhiraj Ghosh, et al., No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance, arXiv:2404.04125v2

Abstract: Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification/retrieval and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets?

We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly. We contribute this long-tail test set as the "Let it Wag!" benchmark to further research in this direction. Taken together, our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training paradigms remains to be found.

Why is scientific progress slowing down? Science is making fewer and fewer breakthrough discoveries.[Hossenfelder]

What's going on? 

1. Nothing at all. Things are just fine. Most scientists prefer this.
2. There's nothing left to discover.
3. Current arrangements award productivity over usefulness.

Turning Point in Hoboken

What do I personally want from an AI? [as soon as possible, too, NOT in the distant future]

I can think of two things off the top of my head: 1) an assistant to deal with my computing needs, and 2) a system to examine literary texts, movies, and other expressive texts to determine, A) whether or not they exhibit ring-form composition, and if not that, then B) what form do they have.

Computing assistant

I’ve already written a post about this: What do I want from my AI Assistant? [control, that's what]. Here’s a chunk of that post:

The fact is, I’m wedded to my computer and to the internet, email and world-wide web. I really couldn’t function very well without them, not as an intellectual. And for the most part I don’t have to spend all that much time fiddling around with things in order to keep them working. But I do have to spend some time. And, yes, I probably could use some changes. But I don’t have the skills I’d need to make those changes, much less the time.

It's obvious that I need an AI Assistant to take care of all of this. Some years ago I sketched out ideas for a PowerPoint Assistant I could control through natural language. I also imagined that what I was thinking about for PowerPoint could be generalized:

The PowerPoint Assistant is only an illustrative example of what will be possible with the new technology. One way to generalize from this example is simply to think of creating such assistants for each of the programs in Microsoft’s Office suite. From that we can then generalize to the full range of end-user application software. Each program is its own universe and each of these universes can be supplied with an easily extensible natural language assistant. Moving in a different direction, one can generalize from application software to operating systems and net browsers.

Back then – the notes originally date from 2002-2003 – the technology we’d need to do that didn’t exist. Now it does.

Who’s going to control these AI Assistants? The end-users or the MegaCorps?

I don’t have much more to say about that at this point beyond observing that I think privacy and security will be real problems here. If I were to think about writing detailed specs for that I might start with this working paper I prepared some years ago about how my use of personal computers has changed over the years: Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines.

Determining the formal structure of texts

The thing is, this isn’t a deep problem, this isn’t rocket science. There are these discussions that talk about AIs that will one day find a cure for cancer, figure how to make a practical fusion reactor, discover a grand unified theory, and solve climate change. Determining the form of a literary text isn’t like that. It’s not easy, but it doesn’t take anything like genius either.

I specify ring-form composition in particular because it is something fairly specific to look for. I think that’s easier than simply requestion: Tell me the form of this text. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ring-form composition, in narratives, poems, and movies and blogged about it quite a bit. I’ve prepared a number of working papers on it as well.

What makes it tricky is that I can’t come up with a list of specific indicators that can be quickly identified as signs that the text has a ring-form. Nor can a specify exactly what feature to look for. It varies from one text to another. The only general thing I can say is that the text have this general form:

A, B, C...X...C’, B’, A’

The first section of the text is echoed by the last, the second is echoed by the next to last, and so forth, and there is a central section that serves as a turning point.

I have a post where I presented ChatGPT with a text of “St. George and the Dragon,” which does have ring-form, and asked it to analyze the text. The results of that experiment are, at best, inconclusive. The form is more obvious than in post texts, and the text is a short one.

What would it have done with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is known to exhibit ring-form? I have no idea. James Ryan has identified ring-composition in 26 of Shakespeare’s plays. I’d like an AI that could verify his work, or at least rough out a description which Shakespeare experts could then check.

And so forth and so on through every text in the canon, however you want to identify the canon. But, by all, non-canonical texts as well. I’ve found ring-composition in a manga by Osamu Tezuka, Metropolis (certainly in the Japanese pop-culture canon), and in Obama’s “Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,” which is not normally within the compass of specifically literary texts. I’ve also found it in films, such as the 1954 Japanese film, Gojira, or the “Pastoral Symphony” episode of Disney’s Fantasia. Films present a particular challenge as LLMs can’t view them and I suspect we’ve got a way to go to create AIs that can view films and parse the themes and action.

Identifying ring-composition is one thing. Identifying other formal structures is something else. You want to identify formal structures that appear in text after text, whether verbal or filmic. Structural description may not be rocket science, but it’s not obvious either. You have to compare texts with one another to see what makes sense. “What makes sense,” that’s a vague methodological prescription if ever there was one. But it’s the best I can do in a short post.

I could go on and on. But this is quite enough to state the problem. Perhaps I’ll say some more later.

A gorgeous white iris

Interpretation and Judgement in Literary Criticism

Nicholas Dames & John Plotz discuss Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study with the book’s author, John Guillory, over at Public Books. This bit, at the beginning, caught my attention:

Nicholas Dames (ND): I’d love to pick up a dyad in the last chapter of the book: between interpretation and judgment. Regarding the professional prestige or importance of interpretation, you say “we [scholars] do not like to acknowledge…that literary artifacts do not need to be interpreted.” Can you say more about that distinction between interpretation and judgment? Or interpretation and understanding?

John Guillory (JG): Interpretation is a relation to texts that we can consider to be very old. In fact, aboriginal. We’re always engaged with texts and particularly complex texts with an effort to understand them. That often requires a complicated procedure. It comes to be known as interpretation.

Interpretation has its own history, but criticism in its origins was not a procedure of interpretation. It was, from its beginnings in the 17th century, all about judgment. And it was only in the 20th century that judgment and interpretation came to converge in a practice, which was the practice of “New Criticism” in the US and “Practical Criticism” in England.

ND: That discarding of judgment, though, John, it feels to me—this is coming out of your analysis, but also just my sense of having been in the profession a while—never quite complete. So judgment becomes the shadow activity or the secret of the discipline. I’m wondering if … You do think, I assume, that there are costs to this, to the severance from judgment?

JG: Yes. I do think that there are costs. There have been costs for us. One of the costs—a number of people are pointing this out now, because we’re in a renaissance of judgment in the discipline. It’s becoming an activity, again, that people are trying to perform and also to make sophisticated.

But the cost of it, we’ve come to realize, is that interpretation is something that isn’t obviously necessary for most readers of literature, as also for consumers of the other arts. It isn’t the case that people encounter novels and plays and poems and feel the need, after those encounters, after those engagements, to say what they think they mean. Literary critics, who started out as principally the ones who showed you how to judge, have gone off in this other direction and become interpreters. They’ve been cut off as a result from the mass readership of literature.

YES! Interpretation is an acquired taste, as it were. It isn’t necessary for the enjoyment of literature. So what is it good for, anyhow? That’s an interesting question, well beyond the scope of this brief note.

John Plotz (JP): This might be a distinction without a difference. Is your understanding that scholars are still implicitly practicing judgment, but only with this super-added layer of interpretation upon it? Or that they’ve literally discarded the judgment?

JG: What I wanted to show was that by the later 1960s, judgment was returning in the mode of, not the criticism of the literary work, but the criticism of society—interpreting literary works in order to arrive at a judgment of society.

What happened was what I call the “reassertion of criticism,” but the reassertion of criticism with this different end, with this different purpose. Some of that judgment redounded back on literary works, so that it was possible for a number of scholars to judge the literary works themselves as morally and politically objectionable. That’s presented us with this perennial problem of, when we do talk about literary works in the context of the criticism of society, what do we want to say about the value of literary works themselves in that context?

Is the value of the literary work its capacity to disclose aspects of society that need to be judged adversely? Or is the value of the literary work its transcendence of those conditions in society that need to be pointed out, condemned, and ultimately be averted?

ND: The way you present it in your book, it’s as if this question of judgment and its place becomes also tied into a social psychology of what a literature professor is. Is it that we repress judgment?

JG: Reviewers have never lost this capacity to make judgments of contemporary work. Of course, that’s what criticism was originally. In the 18th century, when people were writing criticism, they were writing criticism about contemporary work. The assumption always was that if it was ancient, it was good. The problem that we have is that it’s very difficult for us to distinguish between what we do when we judge that, because it’s something that we’re wanting to do more and more of.

And it’s behind that lateral movement of those who were trained in literary study in the academy out into the internet, where the activity mixes some aspects of scholarship with aspects of reviewing.

I don’t think that a paradigm has especially gelled yet, but I do think that’s an interesting new phenomenon. Because prior to this, these two things have just pulled apart. Reviewing is where judgment takes place, and it’s with reference to contemporary work. Scholarship is where interpretation takes place, and it can be contemporary and also historical, but it doesn’t necessarily involve judgment of the work itself. Rather, it involves judgment in the transferred sense of judgment of society, the critique of society. That’s where we went.

FWIW, that's what I'm during with my current writing about Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted. I've already offered some judgement. I'm in the process of doing a bit of interpretation to justify that judgement.

There’s much more at the link.

H/t 3QD.

There's more unhappiness on the political left than on the right

Thomas B. Edsall, The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing, NYTimes, May 8, 2024.

Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?

A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.

Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.

The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives. More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness, but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.

One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.

There is, in addition, a parallel phenomenon taking place on the right as Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists angrily complain of oppression by liberals who engage in a relentless vendetta to keep their idol out of the White House.

There is a difference in the way the left and right react to frustration and grievance. Instead of despair, the contemporary right has responded with mounting anger, rejecting democratic institutions and norms. [...]

In other words, Trump and his allies respond to adversity and what they see as attacks from the left with threats and anger, while a segment of the left often but not always responds to adversity and social inequity with dejection and sorrow.

There's more at the link.

He walks the line, barefoot

Whale vocalization, phonemes? (was Disney there first?)

Carl Zimmer, Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs, NYTimes, May 7, 2024.

Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics. Are the animals producing complex messages akin to human language? Or sharing simpler pieces of information, like dancing bees do? Or are they communicating something else we don’t yet understand?

In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans. On Tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

People have a pho-ne-tic alphabet too, which we use to produce a practically infinite supply of words. But Shane Gero, a marine biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and an author of the study, said it’s unclear whether sperm whales similarly turn their phonetic sounds into a language.

“The fundamental similarities that we do find are really fascinating,” Dr. Gero said. “It’s totally changed the way we have to do work going forward.”

Clicks, not melodies:

Sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, which became a sensation in the 1960s. Instead, they rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door. Sperm whales typically produce pulses of between three and 40 clicks, known as codas. They usually sing these codas while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating with one another.

ChatMOBY-DICK?

Microphones deployed in the Caribbean are capturing ocean sounds 24 hours a day, and scientists are programming computers to learn how to pick sperm whale songs out from the background noise.

Dr. Andreas and his colleagues are also training artificial intelligence programs similar to ChatGPT. After listening to the sperm whale songs, these models might learn to recognize not just rubato and ornamentation, but other features that scientists have missed.

The hope is that computers will then be able to compose whale songs of their own, which could then be played to the whales.

That effort leaves other experts skeptical. Luke Rendell, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, worries that the A.I. models assume whale songs are a kind of language, rather than something more like music.

“I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”

There's much more at the link.

Meanwhile, back in 1946 Disney release Willie the Operatic Whale. Here's a clip (watch it now, before Disney snatches it away):

Three pansy-scapes in Hoboken

Obesity is a biochemical problem, not a moral one [Big Food, Bigger Bodies]

Johann Hari, A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong, NYTimes, May 7, 2024.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 203 pounds to 161 in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.

I’m not the only one. In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.

This is happening because we are trapped in a set of old stories about what obesity is and the morally acceptable ways to overcome it.

An experiment:

One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Satiety:

Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”

Once you understand this context, it becomes clear that processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these treatments can repair that hole. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University who has studied hunger for 40 years, told me the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”

Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction. I felt like a failure for being fat and was furious with myself for it. Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis?

We've got two culture-wide tropes working against us:

When Pope Gregory I laid out the seven deadly sins in the sixth century, one of them was gluttony, usually illustrated with grotesque-seeming images of overweight people. Sin requires punishment before you can get to redemption. [...]

The second idea is that we are all in a competition when it comes to weight. Ours is a society full of people fighting against the forces in our food that are making us fatter. It is often painful to do this: You have to tolerate hunger or engage in extreme forms of exercise. It feels like a contest in which each thin person creates additional pressure on others to do the same. Looked at in this way, people on Ozempic can resemble cyclists like Lance Armstrong who used performance-enhancing drugs. Those who manage their weight without drugs might think, “I worked hard for this, and you get it for as little as a weekly jab?”

The bottom line:

Early indications are that the new anti-obesity drugs are moving people in a similar radically healthier direction, massively reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke. But these drugs may increase the risk for thyroid cancer. I am worried they diminish muscle mass and fear they may supercharge eating disorders. This is a complex picture in which the evidence has to be weighed very carefully.

But we can’t do that if we remain lost in stories inherited from premodern popes or in a senseless competition that leaves us all, in the end, losers. Do we want these weight loss drugs to be another opportunity to tear one another down? Or do we want to realize that the food industry has profoundly altered the appetites of us all — leaving us trapped in the same cage, scrambling to find a way out?

There's more at the link.

Breakfast elements

ChatGPT outlines a sequel to Unfrosted [Media Notes 119 C]

When I’d posted my remarks on Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, I figured that was pretty much it. But I kept on thinking about it: Seinfeld’s a stone-cold comic genius, so why’s the movie so flat? I figured it had something to do with trying to inflate a brilliant 3- or 4-minute stand-up bit into a one-and-a-half-hour feature motion picture. That’s all well and good, but spell it out: Just what does that actually mean?

So I watched the film a second time and then, so help me, a third time, while taking notes, three pages worth. But somehow I couldn’t cajole myself into actually writing a post. Fortunately the Bill Maher convo came along. So I posted that, transcribing a bit where Jerry talks about Unfrosted.

Then I decided to play around with ChatGPT. I asked it for short bios of a bunch of the characters in the film: Thurl Ravenscroft, Marjorie Post, Jack Lalanne, Harold von Braunhut, Poppy Northcutt, Walter Cronkite, Chester Slink, Roger Sterling, Snap, Tom Carvel, Mike Puntz, and El Sucre. I gave me correct information about the real people, identified Roger Sterling as a fictional character, suggested that Snap might be one of those cereal mascots, and had nothing to say about Chester Slink, Minke Puntz, and El Sucre, though it did note the “sucre” is Spanish for sugar.

Then I decided to play around. A little of this led to a little of that and before I knew it, the Chatster had come up with a treatment for a sequel, which I've appended below. It’s a bit thin on details, as treatments tend to be, but there’s something there. Just what, I don’t know. But something. Who knows, with a team of crack Hollywood script doctors working it over, it might become a brilliant amalgam of Duck Soup, The Founder, and Galaxy Quest. In fact, maybe I’ll suggest just that to the Chatster the next time I sign on.

* * * * *

Title: "Out of This World: A Pop Tart Odyssey"

Genre: Comedy

Director: Jerry Seinfeld

Synopsis:

In the quaint town of Suburbia, USA, chaos reigns supreme when a trio of mischievous cereal mascots, Snap, Crackle, and Pop, stumble upon a scandalous tell-all book written by the charismatic but troubled creative director of Sterling & Co. Advertising Agency, Roger Sterling. As the scandal threatens to tear the town apart, unlikely heroes emerge to navigate the chaos and uncover the true meaning of redemption, friendship, and the pursuit of the impossible dream.

Poppy Northcutt, the brilliant but socially awkward rocket scientist working at Mission Control, sees an opportunity to reclaim control of the narrative and redirect attention towards the town's most ambitious endeavor—the Apollo Space Program. With the help of her eccentric mentor, Harold von Braunhut, and the unwavering support of her loyal friends, Poppy embarks on a quest to inspire a new generation of aspiring astronauts to reach for the stars.

Meanwhile, amidst the chaos of scandal, Tom Carvel, the gruff but lovable owner of the Carvel ice cream parlor, sees an opportunity to capitalize on the town's insatiable appetite for distraction and indulgence. Drawing inspiration from Snap, Crackle, and Pop's mischievous antics, Tom embarks on a quest to create the ultimate comfort food—a revolutionary new snack that combines the convenience of breakfast with the irresistible sweetness of dessert.

As the town's social hierarchy is upended and long-buried secrets come crashing to the surface, unlikely alliances are formed, friendships are tested, and love blossoms in the most unexpected of places. And as the chaos monkeys wreak havoc on the town, they ultimately become the catalyst for a series of events that will forever change the course of history.

In the end, amidst the chaos and confusion, the town of Suburbia, USA, discovers that sometimes the greatest adventures can be found in the most unlikely of places—and that true happiness lies in following your heart, no matter where it may lead.

"Out of This World: A Pop Tart Odyssey" is a heartwarming and hilarious comedy that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit and the power of friendship, love, and the pursuit of the impossible dream. With Jerry Seinfeld at the helm, audiences are in for a wild ride that will leave them laughing, crying, and cheering for more.