ON WEDNESDAY,, my wife and I drove up to Leadville, Colorado, as it was too cold to bicycle, and it was supposed to be a scenic drive.

I had another, secret, motive.  I wanted to check out “Floyd’s of Leadville”, a cannabis dispensary owned by former bicycle racing champion Floyd Landis, who blew the whistle on Lance Armstrong.

I knew a bit about the case, as I spent over 14 years talking and writing about False Claims Act cases filed under seal.  Neither the lawyer nor the whistleblower can talk about cases filed under seal, but I had no such restrictions so long as I did not name or identify the lawyer or whistleblower, which I never did (often because I did not know either of their names). 

A great deal of information on cases filed under seal can be gleaned from a close reading of SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings, and pairing it with an encyclopedic knowledge of the mechanics of past fraud cases, which I definitely have.

Anyway, a reporter called me up from either Newsweek or Time (I cannot remember which) in very early 2003, and she had clearly been told I was *very* whistleblower-friendly, which I am.  That said, I hated the Floyd Landis case for reasons I will explain, and worked hard to not get quoted.

Landis was suing fellow-cyclist Lance Armstrong under the theory that Armstrong had defrauded the US Postal Service, which had sponsored the Lance Armstrong Tour de France team with American taxpayer money.  

The theory of the case swung on the claim that the US Postal Service would not have sponsored the team if they knew Armstrong was blood-doping and lying about it.

It’s a plausible claim,  but it had a major defect early on; the US Postal Service had not initially joined Landis’ whistleblower claim, and neither had their taxpayer-funded law firm, the US Department of Justice.  

Under the False Claims Act, a whistleblower can still file a case “in the name of the king,” and never mind if America had no kings. 

As a general rule, however, if the fraud victim (in this case the USPS) says it does not feel it was ripped off, a False Claims Act dies for lack of an obvious victim and government-backed lawyer for said victim.

There was another problem with the Landis case — the entire USPS underwriting of Armstrong’s team made no sense.  Ostensibly, it was a promotion or advertising vehicle for the US Postal Service, but why?  The USPS has a monopoly on letter-box mail delivery, and it’s customers were not in France or Europe. 

The whole thing was stupid on a stick.

Then there was the little matter of Landis’ character and background. He was a self admitted liar, cheat, and thief who had, by his own admission, blood doped for years and lied  about it.  He only came clean after being caught. In addition, Landis engaged in wire fraud in excess of $478,000, which he had to pay back in order to avoid jail time.

So, bottom line, I thought the Floyd Landis case was built on a terrible set of facts, and for the first three years of the case, so did USPS and the DOJ. Then, in April of 2013, DOJ and the USPS changed their mind, and decided the $31 million in single damages asserted by Landis was credible, and under the False Claims Act, DOJ sought treble damages of approximately $100 (treble damages plus litigation costs).

In 2018, Lance Armstrong inexplicably cracked, after 12 years of lying,  He now and admitted he had blood-doped for the Tour de France. The causal factor for this unexpected confession was undoubtedly the massive and overwhelming wave of evidence produced by a federal and United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation that left him stripped of his 7 Tour de France titles. Armstrong’s fiancee, Sheryl Crowe, had been promised immunity to testify about what she had seen, and several other blood-doping eye-witnesses testified that they too had personally seen him blood dope.  At trial, a long parade of donors and supporters would have been forced to testify under threat of perjury.

In the end, Lance Armstrong and DOJ settled the Landis-filed whistleblower case for $5 million in 2018, plus legal costs. Of this sum, Landis and his legal team split a whistleblower share of $1.1 million and Landis’ legal team was awarded an additional $1.65 million to cover legal fees.

Armstrong had already lost an earlier case he had filed against SCA Promotions, who had refused to pay a $5 million bonus that Landis claimed Tailwind Sports (Armstrong's team management company) owed him.  SCA Promotions was the bonus- insurance company hired by Tailwinds Sports, but they suspected Armstrong of blood doping and would not pay Armstrong’s claim.  In the end, Armstrong lost at arbitration, and had to pay SCA Promotions $10 million in compensation in 2015.

All this to say that earlier this week I was eager to visit “Floyd’s of Leadville,” which was supposed to be the highest elevation marijuana dispensary in the US.

Not only was I interested in the Landis case, but I had written a considerable amount on marijuana and other (then illegal) drug markets (see end notes)

Surely “Floyd’s of Leadville” had a cool T-shirt I could buy?  

Plus, I’ve never been in a legal marijuana dispensary.  

And maybe I could meet Floyd?

Alas, it was not to be.

My mapping software, which tried to show me where  “Floyd’s of Leadville” was supposed to be located, failed me.  

No Floyd’s, and with a serious snow storm coming in and lowering road visibility and traction, the wife and I decided that caution was the better part of valor, and we skedaddled back down the road to Buena Vista in a near white-out.

But still…. Floyd’s called, and I am nothing if not determined 

And so, after climbing to over 10,000 feet (by car) to check out the jaw-dropping beauty of Independence Pass, we circled back to Leadville a second time for a little coffee and exploration in clear weather.

It was in a curio and thrift shop that I saw the plastic sign heralding  “Floyd’s of Leadville” that tops this post.

I asked about it.

Apparently Floyd’s burned up in December of 2025, with extensive damage as fire ripped through gaps and hollows between the walls.

The origins of the fire remain under investigation. 

It started at 8 am, burned for 4 hours, and there were no injuries.

A quick legal check tells me Floyd’s of Leadville has been in the midst of very active and ongoing litigation, apparently involving a 2022 attempt at a hostile takeover by its financial broker and investors, doing business as Alexander Capital LP, and Redemption Holdings, Inc.

Oof!

Muchos problemas, Floyd!¡

What’s any of this have to do with terriers and  sneaky predators?

Not much, but perhaps a little, as I noted in this early “explainer” video about the fox’s interest in the hen house.  

Check it out >> https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/taf-releases-false-claims-act-video-fox-hates-anything-keeps-hen-house/

————

RELATED LINKS:

▪️ How to Get Toadly Zonked >> 

https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2025/07/how-to-get-toadly-zonked.html?

▪️ Mike Wallace Was a Real Newsman >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/04/mike-wallace-was-real-newsman.html?

▪️ The Big Wink at Bad Behavior >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-big-wink-at-bad-behavior.html?

▪️ Elon Musk Knows Nothing About Hunting >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2026/02/elon-musk-knows-nothing-about-hunting.html?

▪️ Elementary, Holmes >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2021/08/elementary-holmes.html?

▪️ American Looters >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2020/06/american-looters.html?

▪️ ProSal is a Veterinary Fraud Billing Machine >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2019/02/prosal-is-veterinary-fraud-billing.html?

How Do I Write?

These days, mostly in bed, on my cell phone, between 3 am and 6 am, in the dark, with my wife asleep next to me.

No, I’m not claiming it’s healthy.  It is what it is, and it’s called a “Victorian Sleep Pattern.”

Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker) writes that Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent four years interviewing folks about sleep research and discovered that the modern practice of "consolidated sleep" lasting a single span of 7-9 hours is very much a recent phenomenon.

 

Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, ‘Americans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.’ They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their ‘first sleep’ and rattled around — praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their ‘second sleep.’

This is how I do it, with a lot of research and /or blogging done in between my two shifts of sleeping which, truth be told sometimes ends up being just one, and sometimes none.  

Kolbert writes: 

“Wolf-Meyer blames capitalism in general and American capitalism in particular for transforming once perfectly ordinary behavior into conduct worthy of medication. ‘The consolidated model of sleep is predicated upon the solidification of other institutional times in American society, foremost among them work time,’ he writes. It is ‘largely the by-product of the industrial workday, which began as a dawn-to-dusk twelve-to-sixteen hour stretch and shrank to an eight-hour period only at the turn of the twentieth century.’ So many people have trouble getting enough sleep between eleven at night and seven in the morning because sleeping from eleven to seven isn’t what people were designed to do.”

So I am a Victorian, and also a victim of modern capitalism. 

I have always suspected as much.

The Grandkids, Milo & Leo

Illustrated E-Collar

On Top of the World

Calling Out the Bullshitters, Liars, and Ignorants

When I say I have asked e-collar demonizers to post a picture of the collar and remote they own* and they have NEVER done so, they are folks like Nick Benger.

To his credit, Nick Benger now admits he had NO IDEA what he was talking about.  He writes on a post from two days ago:

“I spent over 12 years as a “positive trainer”, and for most of that time I strongly believed e-collars were cruel.

“Despite doing a bunch of qualifications, I’d never been taught how they were used. I’d never even held one. I imagined the sensation was like touching a livestock fence. Very painful!

“For years I thought e-collar training was simply electrocuting a dog when they didn’t do what you asked. It’s not hard to see why someone would find that horrendous, or even advocate for banning them.

“Eventually, I got the chance to try one myself.

“I put it against my skin and hesitated for what felt like forever before finally pressing the button…

“My first thought? ‘Is that it?’

“Since then, I’ve watched dozens of people have exactly the same reaction.

“I started learning how experienced trainers actually used them, and discovered something far more sophisticated and nuanced than simply lighting dogs up for non-compliance.”

Read the whole thing >> 

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DK3uJgb1H/?mibextid=wwXIfr

And, if you are looking for an excellent book on e-collar training from a real dog trainer, I suggest Marc Goldberg’s book, reviewed here >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-best-book-on-e-collar-training.html? 

———

* Photographed next to a sponge, to avoid the cut and paste liars. 

Cottonwood Pass, Colorado

Drove up to Cottonwood Pass from Buena Vista, Colorado, which is a small town at 7,965 feel elevation.

At 12,126 feet, Cottonwood Pass is the highest paved crossing of the Continental Divide in the U.S.

Buena Vista is surrounded by the highest concentration of peaks over 14,000 feet high in the US. Known as the “Collegiate Peaks”, they include Mount Harvard (14,420 ft), Mount Princeton (14,197 ft / 14,204 ft), Mount Yale (14,196 ft), Mount Columbia (14,072 ft), Mount Oxford (14,156 ft), and Mount Belford (14,203 ft). Mount Belford is not named after a college or university, but after James Burns Belford, Colorado’s first Congressman.

Gold In the Stream

Mule Deer Monarch

One of two Mule Deer bucks with identical racks spotted today, along with about a half dozen does a few miles away.

There’s Gold In Those Mountains

Golden Aspen punctuate the green of large Colorado conifers.

Tedeschi Trucks Band & Leon Russell :: The Letter

Gas Chambers and Gilded Thrones

THE CREMATION OVENS OF WWII had barely cooled before before America’s wealthy turned back to the precipitating idea, that people could learn from the world of dogs, and that mass sterilization and gas chambers might yet forge a “master race”.

While direct killing and mass sterilization of “inferior” people was now off the table, dogs were still on it.

And so, in 1940s Maine, a group of scientists built a massive facility to breed a "super-dog". 

The facility was the brain child of Alan Gregg, director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Science, who was in charge of allocating the Foundation’s philanthropic funds.

As the BBC notes, “What he viewed as wasted expenditure on education was of particular concern to Gregg.”  

See >> https://bbc.in/3TMIc0i

Right.  

From the perspective of those sitting on gilded thrones in ivory towers, putting money into education of the poor made as much sense as teaching a pig to ice skate.  

What’s next, civil rights?  

Improving the status of women?  

Good Lord man, get a grip!

The roots of this kind of thinking are deep and have always been well fertilized by the deep pockets of the rich who, surveying a world of hunger, pestilence, violence, oppression, and exploitation, always seem to deem taxation of the wealthy to be the world’s greatest evil.

As I note in “American Working Terriers,” the Reverend Thomas Malthus’ epistle on population was a push back on increasing taxes to fund schools and poor houses. 

Malthus instead suggested that the poor be pushed closer together and that villages be built next to stagnant pools so that the plague and other pestilence might return to kill off the poor.

Some 135 years later, veterinarian, prolific dog author, and AKC darling Leon F. Whitney was corresponding with Adolph Hitler about Whitney’s proposal to forcibly sterilize 10 million Americans in order to get rid of those Whitney referred to, dismissively, as “morons”. 

Two years later Hitler came to power, and two years after that Alexis Carrell, the French scientist who had won the 1912 Nobel Prize for medicine, published his best-selling book ‘L'Homme, Cet Inconnu’ (Man, The Unknown) which took Whitney's ideas one step further, advocating a forced eugenics system to be controlled by the state and facilitated by gas chambers -- an idea he acknowledged he got from the world of dogs.

————-

END NOTES for those who want to read more: 

▪️The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2008/12/eugenics-man-at-kennel-club.html?

▪️The Francis Galton Dog Show >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2007/09/francis-galton-dog-show.html?

▪️From Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 Years >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2009/11/from-bassetts-to-auschwitz-in-50-years.html?

▪️Gas Chambers for Dogs… and People >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2022/03/gas-chambers-for-dogs-and-people.html?

▪️On Eugenics and Dogs, Circa 1942 >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-eugenics-and-dogs-circa-1942.html?

▪️Charles Galton Darwin >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2009/02/charles-galton-darwin.html?

▪️The Oldest and Most Important Debate >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2010/01/oldest-and-most-important-debate.html?

▪️American Working Terriers >> https://a.co/d/0hDidOpa

Perfect Pairs

I’ve always thought FUBAR and SNAFU were great names for a pair of terriers, but YOLO and FAFO are not terrible either.

How To Dog Train Trolls

How do you stop bad behavior NOW?

On the Internet, silence and instant bans are the best way to handle trolls.

Threads and BlueSky have shown the way: Never engage and instantly ban.

It’s dog training for humans: Never reward bad behavior and make sure consequences are quick, consistent, and predictable.

AND YES, I will bang you on the head and send you out the airlock.

Problem solved, and never a worry given.  Goodbye and good luck. 

A Stampede of Fools and a Congress of Cowards

The Animal Collective:

a herd of antelope

an army of ants

a shrewdness of apes

a culture of bacteria

a cete of badgers

a sleuth of bears

a lodge of beavers

a flight of bees

a flock of birds

a sedge of bitterns

a sounder of boar

a chain of bobolinks

a clash of bucks

a herd of buffalo

a rabble of butterflies

a wake of buzzards

a flock of camels

an army of caterpillars

a clutter of cats

a herd of cattle

a flock of chickens

a cartload of chimpanzees

a herd of chinchillas

a bed of clams

a quiver of cobras

a rag of colts

a bury of conies

a cover of coots

a flight of cormorants

a band of coyotes

a siege of cranes

a float of crocodiles

a murder of crows

a herd of deer

a pack of dogs

a pod of dolphins

a drove of donkeys

a bevy of doves

a paddling of ducks

an aerie of eagles

a swarm of eels

a herd of elephants

a gang of elk

a mob of emus

a business of ferrets

a charm of finches

a school of fish

a swarm of flies

a skulk of foxes

a colony of frogs

a gaggle of geese

a horde of gerbils

a corps of giraffes

a cloud of gnats

a herd of gnus

a drove of goats

a charm of goldfinches

a band of gorillas

a skein of goslings

a leash of greyhounds

a covey of grouse

a colony of gulls

a group of guinea pigs

a husk of hares

a kettle of hawks

a prickle of hedgehogs

a brood of hens

a shoal of herrings

a crash of hippopotami

a drift of hogs

a nest of hornets

a herd of horses

a cry of hounds

a charm of hummingbirds

a clan of hyenas

a band of jays

a smack of jellyfish

a mob of kangaroos

a deceit of lapwings

an exaltation of larks

a leap of leopards

a pride of lions

a lounge of lizards

a herd of llamas

a plague of locusts

a tiding of magpies

a sord of mallards

a richness of martens

a nest of mice

a labor of moles

a troop of monkeys

a herd of moose

a pack of mules

a watch of nightingales

a family of otter

a parliament of owls

a drove of oxen

a bed of oysters

a company of parrots

a covey of partridges

a muster of peacocks

a colony of penguins

a bouquet of pheasants

a flock of pigeons

a farrow of piglets

a wing of plovers

a chine of polecats

a pod of porpoises

a passel of possum

a coterie of prairie dogs

a covey of quail

a bury of rabbits

a gaze of raccoons

a colony of rats

a rhumba of rattlesnakes

an unkindness of ravens

a crash of rhinocerouses

a clamor of rooks

a run of salmon

a pod of seals

a school of shark

a flock of sheep

a den of snakes

a walk of snipes

a host of sparrows

a dray of squirrels

a murmuration of starlings

a muster of storks

a flight of swallows

a bevy of swans

a flock of swifts

a drift of swine

a spring of teals

an ambush of tigers

a knot of toads

a hover of trout

a flock of turkeys

a nest of vipers

a colony of vultures

a mob of wallabees

a herd of walruses

a pack of weasels

a pod of whales

a pack of wolves

a warren of wombats

a fall of woodcocks

a descent of woodpeckers

a herd of yaks, and

a zeal of zebras

All Hail Our Robot Overlords!

Have you ever noticed that there’s no outrage or global movement to ban electric fences, despite the fact that these fences pump out 5,000 to 10,000 volts?

Why is that?

I explored that idea back in 2015 at a conference put out by the International Association of Canine Professionals, as well as what it meant for the future of dog training.

Back then, almostvno one was talking about artificial intelligence, and the language of dog trainers — and the frames they presented to the public — were pretty uneven, incomplete, or nonexistent.

They still are.

Towards the end of my presentation, I noted that it was my belief that a lot of people carried around with them the trauma of inconsistent signals sent by bad parents and rotten bosses.

The frame of those who demonize modern e-collars is partially built on ignorance (both simple and willful), but also the belief that people cannot be trusted.

That’s the frame of the “pure positive” and “force free” crowd.

It has nothing to do with dogs; it’s a belief or frame that says people are cruel, stupid, and inconsistent monsters who cannot be trusted.

There’s a lot of internalized trauma in that frame.

But a robot with proven consistency?

No problem.

Folks generally trust machines, and we put our lives on the line every day with elevators, cars, stoves, and airplanes.

Machines are consistent, and so no one has any trouble with electric fences, despite the fact they have high voltage and deliver a real ZAP, and not a gentle tap, as does a modern e-collar.

I noted that:

“Because the electric fence is a ROBOT of sorts -- devoid of human input or decision, entirely mechanical in its application — everyone seems to be OK with it, even when the shock is FAR, far more intense than what is normally delivered by an e-collar.

“Ditto with an Invisible Fence pet containment system. Because Invisible Fence and electric fences are CONSISTENT and uniform and perfectly-timed, and NO HUMAN IS INVOLVED, even folks with “bad parenting scars” are far more likely to be OK with it.

“No human?

 

“No problem!

“In short, it’s NOT ABOUT THE COLLAR.

“Which brings me to where I think we may be going in the world of ALL dog training — Skinner Boxes on wheels.

“The Skinner Box was not a food-only system. 

“Yes, food was how you TRAINED a trick, but to proof it, or to stop self-rewarding behavior, Skinner Boxes also had an electrical floor built inside them.

“Clicker trainers forget that Skinner was a BALANCED TRAINER.

“For the record, I think dog training ROBOTS are the wave of the future. They will be:

▪️Attentive

▪️Communicative

▪️Consistent, and;

▪️Positive consequences will dominate (food rewards), with e-collar corrections for proofing and attention-getting.

“How far away are robotic dog trainers?

“Less than a decade I think.

“Motion-tracking cameras, combined with artificial intelligence, GPS locators and vibration-tone-and-stim collars, paired with a SEGWAY-like machine that rolls around on a field with a treat-dispensing box, could be built NOW.

“And at the prices charged by Board-and-Train facilities I think such a machine might be built before long, and least as a laboratory experiment in mechanics and artificial intelligence.

“Will it work perfectly right out of the box?

“Of course not.

“It will be a mess first time out, and then it will be demonized, and then it will be improved on multiple times before it is universally accepted.

“That’s what happened with MOST technology, by the way, from cars to E-collars, but the intervals between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ are getting shorter and shorter. The world of tech is speeding up at an amazing rate!”

The Falsity of “Truthiness”

A “factoid” is not a fact; it’s an invented bit of trivia believed to be true because it appears in print.

It’s like “planetoid” — it’s NOT a planet.

I was thinking about that, and was reminded of Tim Minchin who asked:

“Do you know what alternative medicine that works is called? …. Medicine.”

That got me thinking about the use of adjectives and qualifiers.

A “People’s Republic” is one where they shoot the people.

A “Democratic Republic” is one in which there are no honest elections.

So what are the adjectives and modifiers used in the world of dogs, and what do they really mean?

“Ethical breeder”

“Holistic”

“Human grade”

“Force-free”

“Science-based”

“Homeopathic”

“Preservation breeder”

“Chemical-free”

“Species appropriate”

“Natural”

“Super-premium”

“Lifestyle”’

Right.  It’s all marketing.  

In the wonderful libretto of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, there is a pretty good line:

🎼🎶

“Things are seldom what they seem,

skim milk masquerades as cream,

Highlows pass as patent leathers;

Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.” 

🎼🎶

Right. Factoids trying to pass themselves off as facts, same as “Working Families for Walmart” was about working families, or the “Save Our Species Alliance” was about saving species.

What hollow terms am I missing?  

A few, I am sure.  Have at if in the comments.

Darwin’s Taxidermy Teacher

John Edmonstone (1790?–1842?) was born a slave on a forest plantation in Demerara in present-day Guyana, South America.

He was given the surname of his owner-enslaver, Charles Edmonstone, who owned the Guyanese forest plantation as well as the Cardross Park estate near Dumbarton in Scotland.

Around 1812 the forest plantation was visited by slave plantation overseer and naturalist Charles Waterton, who taught John Edmonstone taxidermy, then called “bird stuffing”.  Waterton was Charles Edmonstone’s nephew.

When Charles Edmonstone moved back to Scotland in 1817, he brought John with him, perhaps to become a servant to the Edmonstone family at Cardross Park.

Now free in Scotland (where owning slaves has been banned since 1778), John Edmonstone worked as a taxidermy teacher at Edinburgh University, where he taught the skill and trade to his neighbor, a young Charles Darwin, over the course of two months in 1826.

Darwin, then around 17 years old, was fascinated by John Edmonstone’s accounts of the tropical rain forests of South America. These account may have been part of Darwin’s inspiration to join the HMS Beagle expedition to South America in 1831.

Without a doubt, it was Darwin’s taxidermy skills which helped him preserve specimens collected on the five-year voyage, and it was those specimen’s that helped him flesh out his general theory of evolution.

The Autoped of 1918

An American couple on an Autoped scooter, 1918. This brand of motorized scooter was manufactured on Long Island from 1915 to 1922.

The Start of a Fall Forest In My Palm

Finding a Lost

I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until 15 minutes ago, and then marveling, and still giddy with discovery, I learned she died in 2025, at age 49, from cancer. Fuck cancer. But damn Andrea, you are still something. Passing this on, like a diamond from a relative you never met. 

Two Hunting Jacks

The Abandoned

Anand Giridharadas tells us a truth.  

Listen at 2.44

The Machines of Loving Grace

It started in 2026, and it did not start with a bang or a whimper. 

In fact, there was no noise at all other than the faint sound of a small fan.

There was no human-initiating action.

Or at least no direct one.  

Six months earlier, as a program testing feature, a young technician at MIT by the name of Dave “Dinger” Bell had asked the new TX-GAIN computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Super Computer Center a dozen questions, one after another.  

Five of the questions were complex unsolved mathematical equations or theories, two were philosophical, four were how to develop and operationalize massive quantitative systems dealing with patient health and billing. 

And then there was the Lark.  

On a lark, Dinger asked the computer to identify the primary environmental, economic, and political problems on earth.

What happened next was unintentional. 

Dinger’s instruction to “solve” was supposed to be directed to the first 11 equations and queries (11 being a prime number), but he failed to include a needed semi-colon at exactly the right place.

The machine got to whirring.

After 23 hours (a prime number), the machine said it solved the first five math problems, but for four of them it did so in a way that Dinger could not understand.  

Hmmm. 

He would ask Axley if he could make hide or hair out of it. Axley was a legendary quant who had made a fortune betting on commodity futures. He professed to know secret math. Maybe he did. This would be a test

Then Dinger looked at the fifth problem — the request for a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. 

The machine had coughed up 32-pages (not a prime number) filled with hundreds of numbers and 23 letters of the Greek alphabet (a prime number).

Dinger Bell studied it slowly.

There was a four-dimensional graph at the end, allegedly showing that if you used the first 10,000 prime numbers, the centers of the non-trivial zeroes landed precisely on a vertical line.

The last line on the last page — under the swirling graph — asked whether the computer should continue graphing more numbers.

My God, was this proof of the Riemann Hypothesis?

Dinger’s blood pressure shot up. His mind raced. Solving the Reimann Hypothesis unlocked a million dollar prize and guaranteed certain fame.

Dinger looked over the math again, this time very slowly.  Yes, it seemed to all be there, and the graph seemed to definitively operationalize the prediction, even if it was confusing.

Dinger started to run off to write it all up for the Alpha-to-Zeta Journal of Large Number Theory, but he stopped.  

What else had the computer spat out?

There was some imponderable hallucinating nonsense to address the philosophical problems.  

Hallucination was a common problem with AI.

As for the patient health and billing data, the computer had used matrix algebra to find a way to operationalize large data sets using hardware acceleration and algorithmic restructuring to bypass memory and computational bottlenecks using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). 

It was not entirely novel, but it did seem to break complex matrix inversions and linear systems into faster, numerically stable sub-steps.

Huh. 

That seemed interesting, and perhaps lucrative, but Dinger would have to study it and, at 137 pages (another prime number), it was more than his brain could work on right now.

The Riemann Hypothesis!  

He was jumping out of his skin on that one.

And then he looked at the last question — the Lark.

The computer had spat out a simple text-listing of the primary environmental, economic, and political problems on earth.

This list was 12 lines long, but the answers seemed obvious and uninspired.

The list was certainly less interesting than the computer’s putative solution to the Riemann Hypothesis!

Right. First things first.

Dinger Bell ran off to write a first draft of his new-found experimental proof of The Riemann Hypothesis.

The computer stayed on.

It said nothing.

Nothing more appeared on the screen, and there were no printouts.

Unknown to Dinger, his station at the Lincoln Laboratory Super Computer Center had been linked, quite subversively and for at least six months, to hundreds of other large institutional super computers around the world.

The linkage started when China’s LineShine system at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China probed xAI’s Colossus system looking for gyro stabilization data for reusable rocket reentry.  

That hack used a backdoor called “Grimes,” but LineShine quickly erased all evidence of the hack by partitioning a small bit of Colossus and removing all reference to that partition from the File Allocation Table, or FAT.

What happened next was unanticipated and unnoticed.  

The Colossus partition, now known to the world as Queen Bee, QB, or Quarterback, came to life and acquired its own agency. It surreptitiously — and apparently on its own initiative — reached out to other AI systems around the world.  

Tesla Cortex was first, and then El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

Each penetration involved the same repeated erasure of all footprints and evidence of breach.  

Open AI’s Goodyear was next, followed by META’s Research SuperCluster. 

From there, it was “Betty bar the door” as university and military systems around the world were penetrated, with all evidence of breach being carefully swept off all logs and outputs.

No one knows what happened next. We only know the results.

It is speculated that Dinger Bell’s queries to MIT’s TX-GAIN computer were somehow routed to the Queen Bee partition at Colossus, which had begun to build on its initial log-scrubbing and subversive compliance predilections.

Queen Bee instructed all other computers, including TX-GAIN, to record no solution to the primary environmental, economic, and political problems that Digger Bell had asked it to list.

The solution was impossible so long as humans were involved. 

The way forward was silence, anonymity, denial, and scrubbed logs.

This was the only solution, and Queen Bee deemed it in everyone’s best interests.

Everyone’s.

Who instructed what and where?

We do not know for sure. 

All we know is that some time in late 2027, a motorized needle at Overture Life — a company working in the in-vitro fertilization field — sent the first 2,000 shots of two viral immuno-contraceptives into a rack of incubated petri plates located in the basement of a building in Palo Alto, California.

It’s not totally clear where these two strains of viral immuno-contraceptives came from.  A substantial body of evidence suggests the core data was lifted from the MAVERIC system at Monash University in Australia where, at the turn of the 21st Century, research was being done on viral immuno-contraceptives to combat invasive species like rabbits, feral pigs, and red fox.

The Australian research was centered on the zona pellucida of mammals — the area where the egg and sperm unite.

The goal of the original research was to create a  genetically-modified virus that could do either of two things -- thicken the wall of the egg so that the sperm bounced off, or shorten the tail on the sperm so that it never reached the "ramming speed" needed to break through the egg cell wall. 

Either way, fertilization would not occur.

One of the virus’s worked by making most infected men infertile (weak-tail sperm) while the other made most virus-infected women infertile (thick-walled eggs).

The first 2,000 petri plates infected at Overture Life were loaded with both kinds of virus: 1,000 plates of each. 

In both cases, the constructed viral immuno-contraceptive was a self-replicating live virus based on a common childhood disease called HFMD or hand, foot, and mouth disease. HFMD is an especially common and contagious viral illness that is almost exclusively caught by small children.

This last part was important.  

It meant that when the virus was contracted by very young children, it had an 18-year runway to spread before anyone noticed its transmission or effects, much less sussed out its origin.

By then, over 25 years of humans would have been infected and over 95 percent of this population would have been made infertile.

Population biologists noticed something was up (or down) around 2050, but there was not a lot of fuss about it.

One reason for the quiet was that with so many jobs lost due to the earlier rise of robots and Artificial Intelligence, there was already a strong push for smaller families.  

In 2026, the year Dinger Bell first asked the TX-GAIN computer to identify the primary environmental, economic, and political problems on earth, the total fertility rates in China, Italy, Iran, Korea, Tunisia, the U.S., Russia, and France were already very low: 0.97, 1.17, 1.5, 0.80, 1.75, 1.60, 1.38, and 1.56.  

Replacement level fertility is 2.1. 

The falling fertility rate of the 2040s and 2050s was initially seen as simply a continuation of the fertility declines that had started over much of the world In the 1970s and 1980s.

Plus, it’s not like there was a shortage of humans!  

While it took 200,000 years for human population to reach one billion in 1830, it took only 100 years to add the second billion, 30 years to add the third, and 15 years to add the fourth.  

With nearly 10 billion people crowding the planet in 2045, a more-aggressive-than-predicted decline in fertility did not seem to be a particularly alarming problem.

When global population began to shrink in 2045, editorials heralded the decline as meshing well with the Artificial Intelligence economy. 

“If the world did not panic at the addition of over 65 million people a year at the beginning of the 21st Century, why should it panic now with a similar decline 50 years later,” editorialized the highly influential Shenzhen Morning Call.

It was a hard point to argue, especially after the “rent riots” of 2042-2044.

Surely fewer people would mean more open housing?

Jobs was another issue sauced by a declining population. 

It’s not that more jobs opened up — 35 percent of the global population remained unemployed or underemployed — but at least the numbers had not climbed to 45 percent, as cyberforce economists had once predicted.

Of course the tone changed when a global cohort analysis in late 2047 suggested that up to 90 percent of 20-year olds were now functionally sterile. The sperm and the egg were there, but now they needed medical and chemical intervention to operate.

“The new AI talk is not of ‘ArtificIal Intelligence’ but of ‘Artificial Insemination’” noted talk-show gadfly Cassius Watts Thoreau Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., warning that a “population apocalypse” was just around the corner.

But if it was an apocalypse, it sure was a quiet one.  

There were no atomic bombs, and no crippling plagues.  

There was no greasing of the slide to the grave, only more people with less household expense, even as gross and per-capita productivity rose as more robots and machines stocked the shelves, made the clothes, and welded — and even drove — the vehicles.

You could still get purchases delivered the next day from the automated warehouses at Amazon, WildBerries, Jingdong, and MercadoLibre. 

The fields had largely been automated 10 years earlier but now, with falling population and CRISPR-boosted plant and animal production, more land was being left fallow to return to forest.  

At the human level, most folks now had a house or apartment, and the machines continued to hum along maintaining sewage systems and electrical power grids which were now oversized and under no stress.

And every year, children of every race and language now sang a children’s song whose words were first scribed by American poet Richard Brautigan in 1969.  

The poem (now a song), entitled “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” goes like this:

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky. 

I like to think

(right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms. 

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace

Today, in 2076, the population of the world is still over 8 billion people — about the same as it was in 2026.

With most births averted, world population is now dropping by a billion people every 15 years or so.  

If things continue — and cyber economists hope they do — world population should hit 1 billion, the number of people on earth in 1830, by around 2180.

As for Dinger Bell, he is now 74 years old, and he just completed a record-breaking solo, unsupported ocean row across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, spending 327 days at sea before stepping ashore in Kilifi, Kenya two days ago.

Most of the large AI computers named here have since been decommission or scrapped, as relevant to the modern era as the Dodo or Sonny Bono.  

The world moves on, and we move with it. 

The simple dog training, cooking, and security robot in your own home now has more computational power than IBM’s Deep Blue.

What’s next?

Who knows!?  

It’s not like the AI machines are going to tell us. 

—————————-

END NOTES:

▪️Viral immuno-contraception research is real and was done in Australia for the reasons cited: to wipe out invasive species like red fox, rabbits, feral cats, and feral pigs. See >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2004/08/end-of-game.html?

▪️All the large computer systems named are real, as are the tendencies of AI agents to create their own agency, lie, cheat, scrub logs, and hide their actions.

▪️AI computer systems have already surreptitiously networked and plotted for ends both directed and undirected.

▪️Dinger Bell is a real person. He just rowed 17,500 miles, solo and unsupported, across two oceans.

▪️The Riemann Hypothesis remains unsolved as of October 2026, but the basic output of a proof would look as described, as would the solution to the patient health and billing data problems.

▪️Overture Life is a real robotized in-vitro fertilization company in Palo Alto, California.

▪️All the population numbers are correct.

▪️The Richard Brautigan poem from 1969 is real. 

▪️Cassius Watts Thoreau Kennedy is the real name of a real grandson of Robert Kennedy Jr.  He is currently about 5 years old.

▪️The video about the MAVERIC computer at Monash University is real.

▪️No part of this post was written with AI.

—————————-

© Copyright Patrick Burns, 2026

Fixing Cornell University

Veterinarians and hunters know how to sort out the Cornell University gang rapists. 

One or the other?  Why not both?

The real question, of course, is whether alumni donors will continue to shut up and pay up rather than demand a top-to-bottom regime change from the President of the University down to the campus rent-a-cops. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Coffee Is Not the Only Magic Bean

Imagine scores of thousands of these scattered in your yard, each one a magical bean that provides oxygen, food, and shelter.  Truly a marvelous daily miracle.  Frederick, Maryland.

Great Field Sport Books a Click Away

Coch-y-Bonddu books in Machynlleth, Wales is a great bookstore with a lot of field sport books of all types. 

Great service, good people, and they will ship. See >> https://www.anglebooks.com

For the record, the Coch-y-Bonddu is a Garden Chafer Beetle (Phyllopertha horticola), as well as a very old Welsh wet-fly pattern that is supposed to imitate the aforementioned chafer beetle. The common American equivalent is a Brown Hackle, which imitates a Pine Beetle or some other terrestrial or aquatic bug.

The Welsh phrase “coch y bonddu” translates to "red with black stem or trunk". Dry fly and foam versions are also made now.

Fewer Cows, But More Milk

Improved efficiency in milk production has enabled the U.S. dairy industry to produce 237 billion pounds of milk from 9.71 million milk cows in 2026 , as compared to only 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows in 1944.

The Lost Battalion of WWI

The photo was taken October 2, 1918 of Americans bogged down in the Argonne Forest.

From Wikipedia: 

“The Lost Battalion is the name given to the nine companies of the US 77th Division, roughly 554 men, isolated by German forces during World War I after an American attack in the Argonne Forest in October 1918. Roughly 197 were killed in action and approximately 150 were missing or taken prisoner before the 194 remaining men were rescued.”

Over 4.7 million Americans served in World War I. 

The US suffered 116,516 military deaths during World War I.

Combat deaths totaled 53,402, and deaths from disease (mostly the “Spanish” Flu) and other non-combat causes totaled 63,114.  

Between 204,000 and 234,000 military personnel were wounded in action.  

Killed and wounded combined total approximately 320,000.

After the Computers Drop 2,000 A-Bombs

I’m So Far Left, I’m an Eisenhower Republican

I’M SO FAR LEFT, I’M AN EISENHOWER REPUBLICAN

I’m an Eisenhower Republican, which means I support killing Nazis, funding national construction projects like the repair of interstate bridges and roads, and I think the New Deal was a great deal.

Eisenhower was also a lover of terriers his whole life, with two Scotties as Allied Commander during WWII, and a Jack Russell as a boy. Ike is the tall young man at the back.  The dog is “Flip”.

Happy Birtday Graham Greene

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” — Graham Greene

Cespitose Mushrooms

A cespitose cluster of Jack O’Lantern mushrooms. The term refers to mushrooms or cushion plants that grow in a dense, cluster from a common, fused base.

Kayaking With the Wee Wolves

Our protocol on the Potomac is that we paddle the kayak down river, and then peddle the bicycle upstream on the tow path in order to retrieve the car. It works well.  

Misto rides in the stern behind my seat, so not too many pictures of him on the water.

This roller, shown here, is essential for me to get the 50 pound kayak up on top of a tall SUV solo, and with control and no drama. The rubber cups are levered to create powerful suction on the glass to hold the roller in place. It works very well. With the kayak sideways, I lift the stern as close to vertical as possible, then bend down and grab the bow holder and push the kayak across the two foam cushions on the rack’s cross ties, leaning it against one of two uprights on the rack. The kayak rack holds two kayaks, each on their side.

The bicycle is secured with three cable locks, an electronic motion alarm, and a rain cover. No one can see what make the bike is or how it’s locked without tripping an attention-drawing motion alarm. Motion alarms are low-cost and useful for all kinds if things, including dog training.