Artificial intelligence writes a sonnet about my vineyard

I write these posts myself.

My experiments asking an artificial intelligence program to write a post for me have been unsatisfactory, even as a first draft. 

They seem to me to be like Wonder Bread: empty calories. Experimental posts sound knowledgeable, but they don't make clear arguments that are persuasive to me. Or maybe the real problem for me is that they don't sound like me to my own ear, and I am vain. In any case, I write these blog posts the old-fashioned way.

I am going to keep experimenting. Ten years from now we may think that the most important life skill people need to learn is how to write a good prompt, a key, I think, to successful use of AI as a tool. I am doing what children do to find out about the world: play. I goof around, trying to learn what it can do. You can use several AI programs for free, up to a limited amount. I just subscribed to claude.ai for $20/month, so that I could have all the practice I have time for.

Today will be an untypical post, about AI, not politics. I want to be at my vineyard early today, by 6 a.m. if possible, to beat the heat, so I am dashing this off. My grandnephew, Liam, who is staying at the farmhouse this summer, will have started work at 6. I will join him working through the rows, doing the maintenance tasks of a vineyard in this part of the summer: tucking vines into the wires, clipping unruly vines, checking the plants for water, removing leaves from in front of the grapes on the east side of the row, and looking for the noxious puncture-vine weed. Here is what we looked like yesterday at noon.

So today's post is a quick report on my AI play. I first asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet. I wanted to challenge it on issues of tone so I described my own situation, I am the fourth generation on a farm, but like most landowners of rural land lacking heirs who want to farm. I am not surprised. Wanting to do professional work "in town" shows good judgment on their part. It is hard to make a living working on a farm, and much farmwork is hard, uncomfortable, dirty, sweaty, and tedious. I thought I would see if AI programs could communicate a nuanced emotion about my situation as well as I could. 

The answer is yes.

Note that I am polite in my prompt, saying "please" to a piece of software, which is silly. I anthropomorphize the AI program because it seems so human in its interactions.

My prompt:
Please write a sonnet in the classic Shakespearean form reflecting the thoughts of a 76 year old man planting a vineyard, knowing that the grapes, and eventually the wine, will be enjoyed by people he won't know, long after he is gone. He reflects that he has no heirs who would want to own or manage the vineyard. But the wine will be a legacy of a sort. The man is a bit somber, but ok with that outcome.

Here is how ChatGPT responded, within two seconds:

Upon this slope I set the tender vine,
Though I shall never taste its fullest grace;
The clusters yet unborn, the future wine,
Will ripen for another time and place.
No eager child stands waiting for this land,
No heir will walk these rows when I am gone;
No blood of mine will guide a weathered hand
To greet the dew and watch the coming dawn.
At seventy-six, I know the seasons' claim;
The frost, the sun, the harvest, and decline.
Yet still I bend to earth and stake each frame,
Entrusting years beyond the reach of mine. 

Though none may speak my name when corks are drawn,
My vintage shall endure when I am gone.

I doubt if I could have written that sonnet, but if I tried, it would have been a labor of many hours. Possibly a reader with well-developed taste in literature or poetry thinks the sonnet poor in quality, but to my mind it is quite good. Or at least for most purposes, good enough, and a better use of my time than laboring for days to try to duplicate it.

I wondered what the AI program Claude would do. I gave it the identical prompt. In two seconds this emerged:

These vines I press to earth with aging hands
Will never yield their fruit to eyes of mine;
The harvest waits for those in distant lands
Of time, who'll lift a glass of unknown wine.

No son stoops here beside me in the row,
No daughter asks the names of root and cane;
The ones I loved have other fields to sow,
And so I work this dark and patient plain.

Yet something in the soil will hold my name—
Not written, but pressed deep in root and stone,
In tannin, in the color of the flame
That warms a stranger's glass when I am gone.

    I plant not for myself, nor blood, nor kin—
    But for the joy that I was ever in.

I am amazed by this one, too. A sonnet in perfect form and rhyme pattern, done instantly! My criticism of the two poems is essentially criticism of my prompt. The two poems hit the issue of not having heirs who want to farm harder than I really feel, but that is on me, not AI. My prompt mentioned that issue, not how much I enjoy the farm, so, it gave me what I said I wanted.

It is 5:38 a.m. and I am going out the door, leaving a realm of ideas, information, and abstractions to enter another realm: real life. Vineyards are plants growing in dirt. Real dirt, not the idea of dirt. I am a real, live person, who will have clippers in my hand. The vines are alive, green, leafy, and there are very young grapes on them. The baby grapes are in a  process of becoming, but I will deal with them existing as they are right now, this morning, not as they might be at harvest. The vineyard is here, now, physical, and real. 

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Can a Demoocrat win in a bright red congressional district?

The question is on my mind because I live in one: Oregon's Second Congressional District.

Is there a strategy or issue-frame that might work to elect a Democrat? 

I think there is.

The second congressional district includes the reddest part of the state. Voters in rural Eastern Oregon wanted their own district where they could elect one of their own; Democrats gave it to them. The incumbent Republican U.S. Representative, Cliff Bentz, has been winning general elections by a two-to-one margin.

 

We have experience in what does not work for a Democrat to get elected. Good people have tried. They have been plausible candidates for winning swing districts. They visited the country fairs and talked easily with farmers and ranchers. They tried to sell themselves. [See? I'm a good person, a reasonable person, a Democrat you can like.] It didn't work. They still lost by 30 points.  

 

Democrats have good issues. Gasoline and grocery prices are up, the tariff wars hurt agricultural sales, the war with Iran is going poorly, and billionaires got tax cuts. The district has a significant skew toward people who use the Oregon Health Plan, Oregon's version of Medicaid. Republicans have tried to eliminate the ACA, and now, after the Big Beautiful Bill became law, people are learning that their insurance premiums will go up substantially, making coverage unaffordable for many people. Rep. Bentz is part of the caucus that fights the ACA and passed the Big Beautiful Bill. It should be a motivator for Republican voters to vote their interest on issues. They don’t. They vote their party.

 

Being well-known and having a reputation for hard work, moderation, and attentiveness to the district has been tried, and it fails. Oregon's Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, has had town meetings in every county in the district, including the very small ones, every year, and has done so for decades. Wyden handily wins the state, but he failed to get a majority of the votes in this district in the 2022 election, losing to a Republican who didn't bother campaigning. 

 

Winning this district any year would be hard. The Democrat's task is made harder by the fact that animal rights advocates circulated an initiative petition and got onto this November's ballot a law to ban fishing and hunting in Oregon. Really. I expect a giant turnout from rural Oregon voters. 

 

There is another approach:

Make the election a referendum, an up-or-down vote on whether the country is on the right track under Trump and this Congress. Define the election as an opportunity to send a message. People are feeling ornery. Give them a clear, direct way to express that emotion. Strip away most of the salesmanship about what a great human being the Democrat is. Voters won't believe it. Sell something they believe: The status quo is bad and getting worse and any change is worth trying.

Such a campaign would take self-discipline for the candidate. Every candidate has an ego and a desire to please. But the more the campaign is about the fine, upstanding Democrat and his oh-so-reasonable Democratic positions on good issues, the more muddled the election would be as a referendum. Resist that temptation to make it about the good-guy Democrat, except insofar as it is about the candidate's good sense to be against an unsatisfactory status quo. The Democrat will have his views, of course, and Democrats and many non-affiliated voters will like them, but if the campaign is about selling the Democrat, then it is a comparison election. That is a loser. It is better that the election be about whether people are happy with the status quo, with Trump, and with a congressman who does nothing to put limits on Trump. Bentz-is-Trump-is-the-status-quo. Are you happy? Are you OK with a do-nothing congressman?

If you want change, vote NO on Bentz. Say no to the puppet Congress that lets Trump run up gasoline and grocery prices, no to high healthcare premiums, no to the White House ballroom, no to midnight tweets depicting Trump as Jesus, no to war with Iran.

Recognize that a lot of people like Trump. The strategy won't win every vote. But a majority of voters want change, so make that the slogan, theme, and brand for the campaign. Bentz is stuck trying to defend the status quo that Trump and Congress created. His is the harder job.

Democrats have work to do to return to being a party that wins majorities in rural America. A candidate who wins can begin doing that repair work in office by supporting good policies and messages. Good government is good politics.

Satisfied with how things are going: 21 percent. Dissatisfied: 76 percent.

Approve of this Congress 10 percent. Disapprove of this Congress 86 percent.

 

Will it work? When conditions are bad enough, it just might. People aren't happy, and the trends are getting worse. 

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Public ownership of the data we create

This is the Fox News headline that triggered my thinking:

This is socialism. 

But let's not call it that. Let's call it tax reduction. Or a dividend.

North Dakota claims an ownership interest in the income from the oil and gas found in that state. The result is lower taxes for residents. Fox cheers.

Alaskans also share in the income from oil and gas drilled in their state. They pay no state income tax or sales tax at all. In fact, Alaskans get paid annual dividends from the Permanent Fund accumulated from oil revenue just for staying alive and living there. Alaskans like it.

When I was a county commissioner in Jackson County, Oregon, the county was a beneficiary of this form of resource socialism. Jackson County government had general fund and road revenue from timber harvested in the county off U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land. The income was so substantial that the county had 1000 employees when I was elected in 1980 and we had essentially no county tax. Timber revenue pretty much paid for county government.

Andrew Yang ran for U.S president in 2019 and 2020 with an idea that seemed fantastical. He said that the U.S. should pay an annual income of $1,000 per month to each and every American citizen. It would replace most public assistance programs, he said. It wasn't welfare. It was our dividend from an ownership interest in the data that Americans have given to our technology companies. That information is valuable -- perhaps as valuable as the revenue businesses get on the margin between what they sell and what it costs them to make what they sell. Businesses, especially tech companies, scraped the data from our libraries with information accumulated over centuries. They gather our universities' research. They collect data from our phone calls, our grocery purchases, the movement of our cars, our electric usage, our traffic cameras, our emails, our TV shows -- the entire wealth of American commerce and culture. 

Andrew Yang drew curious crowds trying to absorb the idea that there was value in that data and that it belonged to the people who created it.

 

A lot has changed in the past six years. Artificial intelligence has become a central issue in our lives and it is creating fortunes that are distorting the economy and our democracy. Companies that are involved in the industry have multitrillion-dollar valuations. The idea that there is value in the information that informs AI doesn't seem crazy at all. It seems obvious. AI is creating value, but it isn't creating information; it is organizing it and giving it back to us. We taught AI what it knows, and are doing so constantly. The raw material that AI processes comes from us. 

The political insight to absorb is that the original data is ours, and like the oil beneath the surface of North Dakota and Alaska, and the trees in the forests of O&C counties, the public has a right to a dividend from its extraction and use. We don't deserve all the income from AI, but we deserve some of it.

I don't know the fair amount of income we deserve from the AI Permanent Fund. Let's debate that. It may not be $1,000 per American. Not yet, anyway. But it should be something, and my purpose here is to assert its justice and fairness, and to put Andrew Yang's proposal back on the table.

I start this post with North Dakota and Alaska to make the point that even red-state legislators and Fox News think a certain amount of socialism is a good idea. They aren't calling it socialism, of course; they are calling it tax reduction. That's OK. Alaskans call it a dividend. That's OK, too. Its foundation is a premise that is moral and political: The public has a legitimate claim on raw material resources extracted from within its jurisdiction. 

This is an idea with bipartisan potential, so long as Democrats have the sense not to insist it be called "socialism."

The future has caught up with Yang's insight. We aren't supplicants. We are owners. If AI wants our data, and it does, then it needs to pay us for it.

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Easy Sunday: Slash, Burn, and Run

Do you remember "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap?

In the 1990s he was a famous CEO at Scott Paper and appliance-maker Sunbeam. A few days after taking over at Sunbeam, he unsheathed his stock in trade: He fired most of the company's senior management, and announced 6,000 layoffs, about half of the firm's work force.  Sunbeam's stock soared. Then it crashed.

John Coster's guest post on Trump, who sold Americans that he was a turnaround CEO for a failing country, brought back memories of "Chainsaw Al."

Some of the most valuable assets of a company or a country are built up over generations. It is a reputation for integrity, reliability, and fair dealing. It is expertise within the employees. It is trust.

Coster had a long career managing multimillion-dollar development projects for high-volume users of electricity. He recently retired -- or is trying to. Amid the rush to build data hubs on Earth and in space, large technology companies keep trying to lure him back to work. They need his expertise.

Guest Post by John Coster

Your post Saturday quoting The Wall Street Journal got me thinking about how Trump, the “Turn-around CEO,” weaseled his way into power with the tacit endorsement of the business elite where he operates with a kind of corporate-valuation mindset. In this model, the CEO and his executive team drive up market valuation by slashing costs that produce short-term earnings that cause the market to react favorably for a few quarters. The CEO gets rewarded on earnings and market cap (or higher valuation for a sale) even if the long-term impact on the business is net-negative. Or worse, some of these companies just disappear, or get absorbed into something unrecognizable. The market understands these guys and plays the game.

Trump convinced enough people (think of the voters as the "Board of Directors") that the country was in his words “a disaster”; undervalued if you will, and only he could “turn it around.” And he promised to do it with swift, decisive and merciless action on trade, taxes, immigration, slashing environmental regulations, and entitlements – and especially all that social-equity malarky. Enough of the “The Board” liked what they heard and hired him – again.

 
Just like a typical “Turn-Around CEO,” he began doing what he said with little pushback from those who could if they had the courage. In this second re-hire, the assets he’s been stripping are not just financial; they are non-monetizable things like reputation, trust, and good-will, the loss of which is hard to restore. He is insulting our allies. He is threatening invasions. He treats trading partners like enemies. Ultimately the burden is on the well-being of the people who put their trust in him, and the likely irreparable damage to our admittedly imperfect, but working systems of government that will be impacted for generations to come. Like corporate raiders, he is impoverishing everything he is overseeing -- with the single goal of enriching himself and his insatiable ego.

And now the venerable WSJ notices.

 

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Things fall apart

The Wall Street Journal admitted in an editorial this morning what I wrote about earlier this week.

Trump TACO-ed on Iran. He chickened out.

Trump has a glass jaw.

I gifted the short editorial here.

Here are some highlights:

Mr. Trump said at his Wednesday news conference. In so many words the President said the Iranians had him over a barrel—of oil. If he had fought on, the market “would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” he said. “The one President I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

There you have it: Mr. Trump was driven by fear of high oil prices and a falling stock market going into the midterm elections. . . .

The U.S. had options but Mr. Trump blinked at the risk. Instead, after two months of cease-fire weakness while the public soured and oil reserves declined, the President acknowledges he gave in to Iran’s economic pressure. . . .

The more hope Messrs. Trump and Vance express in the Iranian regime’s transformation, the more desperate they sound. How else to read their sudden defense of Iran’s missile program, after stopping it had been a declared U.S. war aim? Wishful thinking can’t cover up this deal’s origins in White House fears. As the President himself admits.

I understand that readers might presume that I take an uncharitable look at Trump because I mostly vote for Democrats, and because I have concluded that Trump is a narcissistic, corrupt autocrat with no respect for the country he leads. So of course I would write that his only principle in foreign policy is his own personal political advantage. But I am not alone. The Wall Street Journal shares my opinion.

But the blind cult of Trump is fraying. MAGA "America First" isolationists feel betrayed, and wonder if we are being led around by Israel. Israel hawks feel betrayed, so Trump is getting hurt in both directions. The Epstein mess makes Trump look like he is hiding something, which, of course, he is. Trump's fixations on the 2020 election, on the ballroom, on gold adornments, on the reflecting pool, on a grandiose arch, seem like sideshow distractions to all but people deep in the cult. I would like to think that bona fide Christians are uncomfortable with the way that he presents himself as a tight-with-Jesus Christian warrior. It looks like blasphemy and idolatry to me, but polls show that evangelical Christians are OK with Trump, so far at least.

The Wall Street Journal represents what remains an important part of the GOP coalition: the business establishment. That is a group that wants orderly, rule-of-law enforcement of contracts and patents, predictable interest rate policy, limited regulation, and low taxes on the wealthy. The establishment wants the government to leave it alone unless, and until, they need to be rescued, at which point they become socialists and claim that they must be subsidized to save capitalism and jobs for the downtrodden. I watched this happen in 1985 (savings and loan crisis), 1987 (Black Monday), 1991 (insurance crisis), 1998 (Long-Term Capital collapse), 2000 (internet bubble pops), 2021 (9/11 attack), 2008 (mortgage bubble triggers Great Financial Crisis), and repeatedly in Trump's terms of office whenTrump bailed out farmers to mitigate the effects on them of tariff retaliation, and at key points in the past decade when the government bailed out SpaceX and Tesla. 

The Wall Street Journal is inconsistent and hypocritical, but the newspaper is clear about its interest in defending the business establishment. Trump wants business to do well and he wants the stock market to soar, but he wants it so he can brag about it and be glorified by it. The WSJ is getting clear that Trump's goal is his own wealth and glory, not the country's, and that while the goals theoretically run in parallel, in fact they do not. Trump will happily flout the rule of law, and orderly, predictable process to achieve his goal of personal influence. For the WSJ government ownership of businesses is bad per se, it is socialism. For Trump, the government owning a piece of a business is a source of personal power -- a very good thing. It is a string he can pull to get something he wants. 

Trump is not governing the country on behalf of the WSJ. He is governing it on behalf of the audience of Fox News which glorifies and empowers Trump personally. They are different and, increasingly, they are in opposition. 

Things fall apart.

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Vietnam déjà vu

I got fury in my soul, fury's gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can't study war no more
     Laura Nyro, Save the Country, 1968

Does bombing a foreign country change hearts and minds there?

Yes. It backfires.

Dropping bombs on Vietnam

I imprinted on the music that I heard in my youth, approximately 1963 to 1973. I also imprinted on the lessons of the Vietnam War of the same era. I studied that war by osmosis, the way I listened to music. I was surrounded by it. 

It was an idea universally acknowledged during my youth that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory and a strategic mistake. The Pearl Harbor "sneak attack," changed American minds. Instantly opposition evaporated to our "gettin in" on the war waging in Europe. Attack us, and Americans united in opposition to the attacker. That was settled history, and remains so.

America's youth had learned the origin story of American independence: the brave Minutemen fighting the large imperial power, using guerilla tactics against the Redcoats. We knew something about the Boston Massacre. British troops fired upon protesters. The bad guys were Britain, its king, and their troops.

The Pearl Harbor story fits into that mindset. The attacker is the bad guy bully, and its attacks backfire in the long run. Vietnam fit the pattern in the minds of the anti-war youth.

The U.S. sought regime change in Vietnam. It wanted a pro-American, anti-communist regime. Ho Chi Minh admired the U.S. and its founding documents, but he was a communist, and that was enough for our leaders. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon spoke of the need to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. One reason Vietnam was so hard to pacify was because so many "innocent-looking" civilians, supposedly on our side, were secretly helping the Vietcong. President Johnson understood we had a persuasion problem. He said:

So we must be ready to fight in Vietnam; but, the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds—of the people who actually live out there.

The tactic to win the hearts and minds was the military. We would create pain so great that they would give up. We reported comparative body counts. We celebrated killing 10 enemies for only one of ours. Anyone we killed was an enemy or potential enemy, so that counted. Surely pain would cause them to give up. A saying attributed to Johnson summarized the plan:

 When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

President Trump's original war aim was regime change in Iran. It was a reasonable desire, and indeed a less evangelical, less Islamist Iran has been an American goal since the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up; demonstrators were brutally repressed. The U.S. has a tool: overwhelming military power that could administer pain to the Iranian regime and public. I presume that our bombing the girls school was an accident -- a mistake in targeting -- but I note that our government is not offering a big mea culpa. Stuff happens. There is a logic to not admitting grievious error because what we were doing was creating pain, and what is more painful than having schoolgirls killed as collateral damage? It is Iran's fault for not capitulating, as we had demanded.

Our bombing of Iran was a tactical success. The lesson of Pearl Harbor and Vietnam hold true. Bombing does not displace a government or dispirit the people being bombed. It energizes them. Iran's leadership regime remains in place, stronger than before. The U.S. is withdrawing from the region.

When Trump first campaigned back in 2015 and 2016 he seemed to have learned that lesson. He was, arguably, the peace candidate, and Hillary Clinton was the hawk.

He forgot the lesson, or got persuaded by Israel hawks that this time is different. It wasn't different.

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Trump describes the American glass jaw.

I have felt squeamish about saying that the U.S. has a "glass jaw."

It felt disloyal and un-American to report a dangerous weakness in my country's ability to defend ourselves. 

Trump revealed it in Paris.

Let me explain: "Glass jaw" is a boxing term for a fighter who is knocked out easily from a punch to the face. It means the fighter has an easily discovered vulnerability.

Iran did not need to invade the U.S. to win a war with us and get us to withdraw from the region with its regime intact, its control over the Strait of Hormuz enhanced, its regional influence increased, it being promised some $300 billion for reconstruction, and the U.S. now putting pressure on Israel to stop its attack of Lebanon. It did not need to capture our Capitol. It just needed to rattle our stock market. Trump isn't particularly sensitive to the costs of war or to inflation. But he cares about the stock market.

Take 59 seconds to watch a bit of this press conference in Evian, France, where he praises the genius of the stock market:

Click here

He told reporters that "every time we said something amazing, like 'we're going to settle,' the stock market went up. And every time we said something negative, like 'guess what, we're not going to be able to settle,' it would go down, very big. . . "

Trump said, “If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks,…four weeks, two years….you would never have the Hormuz Strait open. . . ." 

The stock “market would have, instead of going up….would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe, except for 1929. I did not want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened.”

Trump tells lies with ease, but not everything he says is a lie. He is accurately describing the stock market over the past months. The stock market rose and fell on war news, as did oil prices and therefore oil stocks. 

There is an odd silver lining to this glass jaw, and Trump's frank admission of it. Anti-war voters of both parties can reflect that a transactional president, one who entered a war because he thought it might be easy and enhance his popularity, with the potential bonus of grabbing some cheap oil as a spoil of war, is not psychologically and morally committed to pursuing the war for decades. I don't doubt that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon genuinely thought we had some moral obligation to defend democracy, capitalism, freedom, and Western Civilization to stop Soviet and Chinese communism. We had a duty, so the Vietnam war persisted even when it became unpopular.

Trump doesn't appear to have a sense of duty or honor or responsibility to any higher principle. He was in it for the money and the glory. If this is a loser on both counts -- and that is how it is working out -- he stops and leaves Bibi Netanyahu and Israel-hawks in both Israel and the U.S. surprised and disappointed.

The war is a loser, and Trump is cutting his losses. 

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