The Protein Fad

    Go to the grocery store these days and it's everywhere. Now with Protein, Extra Protein, Protein for Your Pet, Protein Up Your Ass. 20g, 30g, 50g in big, bold font, screaming at you. It's worse in the middle section, where all the processed food competes for your attention in a carefully curated order.
    Processed food companies are using the latest protein fad to stock their fake food with exorbitant amounts of it, hoping the health-conscious consumer will bypass all the unhealthy ingredients listed on their labels. Yet before the fad, 90% of Americans were already eating enough of it. Just because a label says "30g of Protein" or "All Natural" or "Organic" does not make it any healthier for you. 
    It's a colossal marketing scam that uses a "healthy" alterative to hide all the sugar, fat, salt, and who knows what other ingredients that make it more addicting. It's on the same level of evil as other marketing scams, like the way rebranding in big tech will render an entirely functional model that could last decades obsolete by some minor upgrade or tweak. 

    Food companies are no different from the tech giants who roll out a new product every five years, forcing you to buy the latest model because their security updates won't register on your older one, or you can't replace the battery without opening it with a sledgehammer. We as consumers have got to stop this madness. Do not buy their Kool-Aid.

Shock Fragments

In shock I scrolled through each crumb on the trail

She left dangling from fishhooks on the seaside

Carrying the burden of a fantasy undisclosed

Through the depression of ignorance.

I can't explain how history repeats itself,
It just does, even by accident or from failing to learn

All the missed signs and stunts and proxy wars
This furtive girl dished decades apart,

Wreaking havoc on my psyche; this cyber doppelganger
Threw her kitsch prayer wheel out the chevy impala,
Landed right on my oblivious noggin, a blooming onion
Dorothea Lange photographed through the dust storm
Furnace of arcana stretching 'cross midland past Medieval Times,
O'er tepid water patrolled by unicorns of the sea 

Screened by Zendaya's euphoria, Earth-tracked by astronauts

All the way to Singapore where IBEW minions

Shipped Jack Kirby ion-plated marvels to the data capital.

Library Storm

     A September storm sweeps in from the south, shaking the leafy branches tinted amber by summer scorn. Some fly off the trees, clawing over the roof like witches on broomsticks. I'm sitting in the library, working from home, the tall wooden towers of my bookshelves lurking over me, meditating on my silence; all the stories, songs, and facts curled up in scrolls of wisdom. They watch over me, my sisters on the shelves, each book a totem to my experiences, each journal an artifact of discovery. The storm enters the room, blows their words around in a whirlwind, speckling the ceiling in constellations of mythological truth.
    I turn on the Golf channel, not because I enjoy golf, but because it relaxes me. The soothing voices always do; they are friendly reminders to take a break from the inner tempest while the outer one stirs beyond. My wife makes fun of me for it, but the books know the truth; the voices are the soft signatures of inner peace, like the serenity of their sentences. 

    Slowly dozing off under ink-scented candlelight the outer tempest shakes my body while the sisters are singing lullabies that sink me into the sultry pages where the ancient elders illuminate me with the grace of God, he whom the tomes worship in their virginal slumber warping me away from the numbers on account, all the way back to when I was a boy in the sixth grade chasing rainbows off the asphalt hoop-rim, their chorus of voices parting my lips and the candlewick blackening and my flesh shivering among the threads of timber that dress my region from endless rain clouds that return every fall, their voices guiding me across the loamy windswept mountains where each book is a summit I must scale in my head to reach some forbidden version of reality transformed by inner dialect with dead sages speaking to me from beyond the grave and I see them, yes, I witness their stories as rich astral paintings conjured from sensitive eyes masked behind a rosy face that refused material richness for believing I was ugly, and I give them my story too, my long road out of the hell that Milton wrote leads up to light and the wind blows this dream off the map and into their medium so that I become them, a soft guiding light, a weak ember in a strong body, listlessly embalmed by light.

AI and the Global Social Contract

     A leading cause of death for birds is from crashing into well-lit buildings. Lights in cities act as beacons for birds to fly toward. However, they cannot see the glass that houses them, causing them to crash, often violently. "At least one billion birds die each year after crashing into skyscrapers and other lighted buildings", said a Cornell research associate.
    At what point should it become mandatory for people to turn off their office lights in skyscrapers at night? Can't we write legislation to save the birds, or any species facing extinction because of us? Merely prompting people to turn off their lights during migration season (which starts now) isn't enough. We already have a tremendously litigious society. More of the legal focus in our country should shift to environmental justice like this, as our future depends on ecological balance.
    Likewise, more of the focus on AI should shift to the environment. It's already being used to redevelop coastlines under threat from rising sea water. A company called Coastal Assembly is making this happen.* Yet most countries are franticly racing to get ahead on AI development for their own status, which poses a domino effect of environmental destruction from high energy use. Sustainable AI means that the astronomical energy use required to fuel data centers should be regulated only for improvements to the global society, not a single nation's economy.

    This regulation should limit AI research to scientists at universities, private companies with a license, or a government institution. And it's not just sustainability that would fall under this realm, but medical, psychological, and educational assistance as well. Care must be taken to protect the jobs of doctors, therapists, and educators, possibly by only allowing them to use the AI for help with something like a complex diagnosis. Instead of using data centers to process things like written documents, research, business decisions, market projections, military operations, or consumption patterns, it should only be legal to use if it benefits a global social contract. Otherwise, all our professions are inherently at risk; and even worse, it will make us intellectually lazy.

    We should not be allowing AI to process our vices, only our virtues. For example, where is the justice in stealing all the written work on the Internet to craft someone's email or report? It is theft, plain and simple. Will the writers like me ever see a penny? Not at this rate. Ignoring vices like these only fuels the darker side of machine learning.

    By only making virtuous learning legal, machine learning may alleviate the stresses of "evil" behavior, thereby teaching itself not to do the kind of harm that is alarming everyone right now. Conversely, only allowing virtuous outcomes keeps the machines operating in a non-threatening manner. I don't believe this type of machine (large language model) will ever become sentient, as it is an entirely different structure from the AI we are used to seeing in movies that takes over the world, or enslaves humans. That type of AI is thankfully much more difficult to design. But all the artistic theft, misinformation deep fakes, and academic dishonesty going on are just several of the many negative side effects of unregulated AI.

    Along with global warming, AI regulation will be a key development as the century progresses. The thing is, these are global problems. If one country tries to solve it, like the U.S. tried to solve the labor crisis in the 1930s, or the environmental crisis in the 1970s, nefarious actors will simply outsource to countries where it isn't regulated. That is why most of our hazardous waste is outsourced, as well as labor; in the U.S. these are heavily regulated sectors. Only when the social contract applies to the entire world can these problems be fixed. 

*Rising Seas Are Gobbling Up Beaches Around the World. A.I. Might Restore Them. - The New York Times

Mobius Strip Airport

     Sometimes it escapes you how cruel someone has been to you. There is a certain type of covert person, acting in stealth to successfully wrap your heart in a knot. But eventually, you see clues that help unwind that Escheresque picture of them, like a twisted ribbon following a divided path of perception. Once you see it, you take flight, right at the intersection of confusion and awareness. That's where you realize, that when someone loves you too much, they twist away from you at the bend. You're then on opposite sides, without them knowing. Their cruelty becomes starved, a secret topography of regret. Then when you come in to land, they're still on the other side, trying to rationalize the boundary. You are safe, back on the ground, while they are fading into the return, another chance to reel you back in. By then, you've already taken flight again, straight through the illusion. They find you absent on the other side.

Little Bird

Hello little bird,
Sitting at my window,
How far will you fly today?
Will you take me with you,
To the ends of the earth,
Show me all the places

I yearned for?
Take me with you

Little bird,
Grant me your wings,
That I might escape

From all my suffering.

Will you take them away,
Banish them

To a forbidden country?
Exile them to Israel

Where they belong?
Thank you, little bird,
For seeing me through
The invisible painless pane,
Where I watch you survive,
Elevated into bliss

By your sudden flight,
Numb of all the operatic discord.