This is why we need more solar farms

Yesterday I was trying to remember the name of President Obama's terrorist buddy, so I asked Google, "Who was President Obama's favorite terrorist?"

Google AI did not take this well. In fact, it got a little testy.

Note the sneer quotes around "favorite terrorist." And the evasive phrase, "as President." Is Google AI suggesting that any terrorist friends President Obama had were just personal friends and didn't have anything to do with his presidency? That's not what I had in mind. I used the word President in recognition of his job title. I grow weary of all the clever, derogatory names people come up with, so I just refer to him as President Obama. I didn't intend to restrict my search to official actions and official friends. (However, I haven't yet grown weary of referring to Pete "Loose Lips" Hegseth and am glad to accommodate his wishes by not referring to him as Secretary of Defense Hegseth).

And what about the attempt to change the subject by talking about President Obama's anti-terrorism actions? Just because President Obama took measures against terrorism doesn't mean there weren't one or more terrorists that he liked. There is nothing to stop even a terrorist, much less a friend of terrorists, from engaging in anti-terrorist activities, or even from devoting himself to anti-terrorist activities. So the word "rather" is really out of place here, doing nothing to answer my question.

Finally, though, no thanks to Google AI, I remembered the name of the terrorist I was thinking of. It was Bill Ayers.

If Google AI had wanted to pick nits, it could have been with the word "favorite." That word didn't make my question easy to answer. There are many ways to play favorites, or to have favorites without playing favorites. A president is in a position to dispense a lot of favors, so how would one identify the mostest favorite of all? Or maybe the term could refer to some sort of relationship that didn't even involve dispensing of favors, as commonly understood.

You'd think an AI would recognize unanswerable questions when it sees them. I had half expected the AI to throw out some names that I'd have to rummage through, maybe explaining that the word "favorite" made the question difficult to answer.

BTW, as an experimental control I asked Google the same question about President George W. Bush. Here is what I got.

I'd like to know how the Google AI can say that my question was based on a misconception without telling me what that misconception is. If it's smart enough to know there is such a misconception, it should be smart enough to identify it. Maybe it would have been smarter not to imagine the basis of my question, and just go straight to saying, "There is no evidence from reliable sources..."

Finally, I was able to figure out (with very little help from Google) the correct spelling of Diether Haenicke, late president of Western Michigan University, who, in one of his columns for the Kalamazoo Gazette, had written about Bill Ayers a month after the 2008 election: Ayers' ties to higher education are more troubling than ties to Obama.

Haenicke began:

During the last phase of the presidential campaign, the name Bill Ayers loomed large. I avoided writing about him while the campaign raged because I did not want to stir the fires of political rhetoric.

The importance of Bill Ayers' casual friendship with Barack Obama was as vastly exaggerated by the McCain camp as it was woefully understated by Obama's. I consider Bill Ayers a dangerous man. But that has, in my opinion, very little if anything to do with Obama's ability to serve as U.S. president. So I waited to say my piece until the election had been decided.

Google's AI doesn't seem to want to talk to me anymore about this subject, and I neglected to save a screenshot, but I'm pretty sure it told me earlier today that this letter was controversial because it was published during the campaign. It also made sure I knew that it had drawn a response that defended Ayers and opposed Haenicke. (I found it and read it. Anybody here could predict what it said.)

Back to Haenicke's column. Among other things, he was disturbed that a person like Ayers should be given a job on the teaching faculty of a major university:

Bill Ayers was one of the founders of the radical left organization called the Weather Underground. His group, during the 1960s and 1970s, conducted a series of bombings of public buildings as a protest against U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War. According to his memoir of those times, titled "Fugitive Days," Ayers participated in placing and exploding bombs in the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. A book Ayers wrote in 1973 is dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted
assassin of Robert Kennedy.

. . .

How can people who escaped the law, threw bombs, stole, cheated and threatened the government with violence end up as educators of the next generation? And in two such critical areas of education: the law and teaching!

It's a good thing for Ayers that none of this happened when Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were in positions of power, right? Google AI was good enough to tell me that Ayers spent very little time in jail. But it makes me wonder about the possibilities. Maybe there are members of the J6 altercations who spent a great deal of time in jail but are now free thanks to President Trump's pardons. Perhaps some of them are having trouble picking up their lives where they left off. Maybe some of them could get university teaching jobs!

And isn't it also a good thing that many thousands of acres of southwest Michigan countryside are being disfigured to install solar farms to power Artificial Intelligence?