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Carrying the water [away]

The metaphors become really complicated at this level, given the thirsty water requirements of LLMs. But give Bloomberg its due for the most succinct cut-line in history of such things:

It cuts way down past the chase, to the quick, and presents what seems an unlikely reveal, inevitable as it may be. We can be relatively sure that neither Fallon nor Google is ashamed to be called out like this. And Photographer: Google really adds that special something.

The clown show is hard, one would imagine. When making people laugh is what keeps the audience coming back, eventually the comedian will become a water carrier for the status quo. It’s the raisin debt of every influencer, about which they are quite open. The question is what it does to us and everything around us, shaded in this light, as it were. The quick can still burn, if the numbness isn’t total.

Pay attention to what ‘becomes the norm.’ It’s certainly not as passive of an activity as the construction suggests.

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Not Knowing Anything

Born yesterday… Just fell off the cabbage truck… wet behind the ears.

We cannot must not forget this very compelling meaning of green. Henry Giroux reminds us what public schools are for.


There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right. Seldom accorded the status of intellectuals that they deserved, they remain the most important component in the learning process for students, while serving as a moral compass to gauge how seriously a society invests in its youth and in the future. Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

Indications of the poisonous transformation of both the role of the public school and the nature of teacher work abound. The passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited the autonomy of teacher authority and devalued the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for student learning. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom. On the contrary, they are now forced to simply implement predetermined instructional procedures and standardized content, at best; and, at worst, put their imaginative powers on hold while using precious classroom time to teach students how to master the skill of test taking. Subject to what might be labeled as a form of bare or stripped-down pedagogy, teachers are removed from the processes of deliberation and reflection, reduced to implementing lock-step, time-on-task pedagogies that do great violence to students, while promoting a division of labor between conception and execution hatched by bureaucrats and “experts” from mainly conservative foundations. Questions regarding how teachers motivate students, make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative, work with parents and the larger community or exercise the authority needed to become a constructive pedagogical force in the classroom and community are now sacrificed to the dictates of an instrumental rationality largely defined through the optic of measurable utility.

Read the whole thing.  Pay forward the Baldwin quote.