Lost and Found: A Journey Through Conscience, Justice, and Quiet Revolt

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, Tom heaves a great sigh as little girl wending her way toward a house puts her foot on the threshold. He picks up a straw and begins balancing it on his nose. Finally, Tom reluctantly strides home.

In order to stay home from school, Tom falls to groaning with considerable sprit, but Sid sleeps on unconscious. Tom just groans louder.

After witnessing a murder, Tom and Huck think that the wound of the murdered man bleeding when Injun Joe helps raise the body would turn the crowd’s suspicion in the right direction. One villager remarks, "It was within three feet of Muff Potter when it done it." Tom’s fearful secret and gnawing conscience disturb his sleep for a week. Sid mentions at breakfast one morning that Tom pitches and talks in his sleep. Tom blanches and drops his eyes.

After Tom and Joe run off, Aunt Polly, thinking Tom dead, says that he never meant any harm. Mrs. Harper says it was the same way with her Joe. Sid hopes Tom is better of where he is. Aunt Polly declares that Tom was such a comfort to her.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck relates that he hasn’t ever seen anybody that hasn’t lied at one time or another, excepting Aunt Polly, the widow Douglass, and Mary. When Huck gets into his old rags and sugar hogshead seeking his freedom, he goes back because Tom hunted him down. Huck prefers his barrel of odds and ends, where everything gets mixed up, the juice swaps around, and things go better together over meals where every component is served apart from the others.

Miss Watson gives Huck a “good going-over” because of the state of his clothes, telling him to pray every day. Huck tries praying for hooks to go with his fishing line three or four times, and asks Miss Watson to try for him. Not telling him why, she calls him a fool. When Huck tells the widow about what happened, she tells him that prayer is for receiving ‘spiritual gifts,’ to help other people, do what you can for them, and look out for them, never thinking about yourself. Huck reckons that he belongs to the widow’s form of Providence.

After not being seen for over a year, Huck’s abusive father is found floating, drowned in the river. Huck eventually realizes that the person isn’t his father, but a woman wearing man’s clothing, because he was found floating on his back, and not his face. He judges that his “old man” will turn up again.

On Jackson’s Island, after he fakes his murder, a couple of squirrels sit on a limb and very friendily jabber at Huck. After dozing off, he wakes to the booms of cannon fire from a ferryboat full of people, trying to make his carcass float to the top. Realizing that they would also be floating loaves downstream with quicksilver in them to find the body, he wades out where the current is closest to the shore, and catches the second one that comes along. Taking out the plug and shaking out the little dab of quicksilver, he sets his teeth in baker’s bread, a real treat for someone of his economic status.

When Huck sneaks back to a small home on the outskirts of the village dressed as a girl, a woman new to the hut he visits tells him that even though Huck’s dad is suspected of killing him, no one will be able to prove that he killed Huck—who everyone is assuming has been murdered. He asks if everyone has stopped thinking that he was killed by Jim. He’s told that a lot of people still think Jim is guilty of it.

Later, after being separated from Jim and swimming ashore, Huck comes across a two part home and is stopped by dogs barking at him. From a window, a voice is heard to ask who’s there after silencing the dogs. Huck replies with, “It’s me,” to which the voice responds. “Who’s me?”

Tom Sawyer is shot during a highly imaginative rescue attempt “by the book.” Huck seeks out a doctor whom he finds to be a kind-looking man. When asked who his folks are, Huck replies that they’re the Phelpses, Tom Sawyer’s Aunt and Uncle.

President Trump displays his ignorance quite profoundly sometimes. He has now signed an executive order that AI chat bots created by companies that work with the federal government must be “anti-woke.” Let’s unravel this. AI chat bots are based on large language models that are trained on a corpus of all known works, tuning a multi-layer network with a lot of layers and a lot more tunable parameters to predict the next most likely word given a context of text leading up to that point. It stochastically selects the word from the most likely alternatives and continues on. There is a self-attention mechanism that develops specific training weights corresponding to the tokens in the vocabulary, another weight matrix that corresponds to their position, and another one that corresponds to how likely one word will follow another in the given context. In essence, they are highly-tuned text auto-completers that take hundreds of thousands of dollars to create.

In addition, the next most likely word isn’t necessarily correct. It looks correct, because that it how they are trained. Like a well-crafted consirpacy theory, everything seems perfectly legit because the crafted language generated is professional in tone. Relying on this data without verifying its content is akin to asking for a lawsuit. In fact, many already have, including a lawyer who referred to imaginary cases generated by one of the engines. The hallucination rate is still at about 3% in most large language models, and without using the web, the data is stale based on what it was trained on.

Enter RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation. In RAG, the LLM is directed to look for the answer in a set of pre-vectorized data, and with appropriate prompting and guardrails can generate answers with references. But the prompt and guardrail engineering is more of an art than a science. Using chain of though technology, the agent tries to generate a set of intructions which is then handed off to an instruction parser. The results can seem pretty impressive.

Web Agents, a newer technology built using LLMs, have the power to use an LLM to parse instructions and interact with a Web Browser to take actions. This works fine until you need to enter credentials or work with a website that uses cookies. Most of the web agents run serverless, which means they don’t have a place to store the cookies, which is used to store local session information. They also don’t have access to a cell phone to do two factor authentication. As part of my job, I attempted to use Browser-Use in local server mode to get around these issues, and discovered that Anthropic Claude 3.5 would get stuck trying to navigate a single web page and burn through tokens (which translates into dollars) trying over and over again. Luckily, I had a prepaid small balance, and when that expired, the agent stopped. Anthropic Claude 3.7 has better promise, but Browser-Use running locally does not have access to that model. Instruction processing and faithfulness to instructions is still a developing technology. Companies that work with the federal government that create these LLMs include Amazon, Meta, and a few others. They have been working behind the scenes to help develop chat engines that return fact-based information, and not idelogical drivel orginating in someone’s head based on someone’s interpretation of a religious book. They have been working hard behind the scenes to make sure that the agent appears considerate, kind, welcoming, and inclusive. There was an issue where an image showing the signing of the Declaration of Independence showed people of color who were not there, but what do you expect of an engine that’s trained to generate new possibilities. Honestly, we should have had people of color there, but the framer’s still had their own racism to deal with, repercussions of which still exist today. That issue has been addressed, but do we need to conceive of a new Declaration of Independence--from Bigotry—that’s what it means to be woke. I want my chat experience to be meaningful, to help me dive deeper to understand the history of people marginalized by the whitewashing elite—not to help erase it. History erasure is a form of cultural genocide. Trump’s executive order targets also erasing the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and relegates trans lives to the dustbins of “gender ideology.” He is attempting to dumb down America. Donnie the Con wants nothing more than to “Make America Gullible Again.”

Enough is enough. I want AI that helps me tackle the world issues in a way that makes it easier for all of to live in harmony in this world, solving issues of food and housing insecurity, increasingly hostile environmental and political climates, and treating people like rubbish, like Trump’s plan to insitutionalize the homeless to pave the way for the super rich of corporate America. I want freedom, equity, and opportunity to mean something for all Americans. This is the America I grew up believing in, not the one that’s being delivered to us by the Chief of Fools.

Monday, I received a call from NavPers (short for Navy Personnel), and asked them what they had for me. They said they were working my name change request on my DD-214, and they had a question about what day my name was legally changed, as it was hard to make out on their copy. I pulled out my copy and told them the correct date that was written over the original date. When he noticed my hypenated last name is slightly longer than the name I was asking for, I explained that it was because I had gotten married, and changed my name to include my wife’s. He understood, and said that I should get my revised DD-214 within a week.

I was ecstatic. I had given up hope that this would ever happen because of the political climate and the executive order. I apologized that when I changed my name originally that I didn’t know that I could have my DD-214 changed as well (a DD-214 is a discharge document that briefly documents your time of service). He told me that they had only figured out the process about a year ago, so I replied that I guess I was right on time. Before we hung up, I gave my condolences to him for any friends of his that would no longer be able to serve or to retire.

Shortly after I hung up, I received and email asking me to send him a copy of my DD-214, since my actual files were in another state due to them being from so long ago. I didn’t hesistate long before I replied with copies of both of my DD-214s from 1987 and 1993 as well as my final performance review that documented earning the Battle Efficiency Excellence Award, and for leading the best ever CA ordnance unload by an FFG-7 at Seal Beach ever.

This restores hope for me. There are people who continue to use their resources to do the right thing, even when dictates are coming from on high to unconstutionally violate the sanctity and respect of human dignity and our fundamental human rights. People like the administrator handling my case are our future, willing to educate themeselves on the issues, and dedicated to doing what is right and just. I would like to imagine that he is not alone, that he joins the ranks of hundreds of thousands quietly revolting through simple acts of justice and compassion.

The last couple of days I have opted to stay at home and try to rest. My body kept insisting on getting more sleep, and even reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t keeping me awake. I also didn’t feel like going out until my replacement debit card arrived. And it never ceases to amaze me that I don’t find what I’ve lost until I’ve replaced it. Turns out, the old card had fallen on the floor of my office, and turned up the day before yesterday. The principle of lost items rematerializing has also recently resulted in my having two sets of trekking poles and three caps for outdoors activities. Maybe there’s a bit of wisdom in this principle about replacing something lost in order to retrieve what was misplaced and thereby have more of it that we had before.

I’m semi-faithful about taking my blood pressure readings per my doctor’s orders. Sometimes I go several days in a row, and sometimes twice a day. I find it a good opportunity to practice biometric meditation. I’ll tell Ziggy to play meditation for three minutes while focusing on just my breath and the pressure in my body, inviting it to relax. When the meditation ends, I turn on the automated cuff and continue my meditation. I repeat this until the both the systolic and diastolic values are within 5 millibars of the last values taken, and record that as my final stable blood pressure. I have found than I can detect when my upper and lower blood pressures are dropping. Maybe it is something that I can eventuall monitor throughout the day when I start feeling stressed, whether it’s at work trying to devise a solution, or because of bad news coming from media sources. Learning to breathe and control stress—it’s so fundamental that we forget to do it sometimes.

My energy levels seemed to final returning this afternoon (just after 2 pm). Was it because of the social interaction after church, meditation exercises, or the iced mocha I’ve been sipping on? I do know that I was too stressed to handle the heat even in the 90s. Here's to hoping my energy levels stabilize back out over the next few days.

In the ebb and flow of chaos and calm, hope can be found in the smallest acts of courage and grace. Through childhood tales of truth and rebellion, through political storms and personal victories, this journey reflects the resilience of the human spirit. Whether it's Tom’s conscience stirring in the night, Huck’s unvarnished honesty, or the fight for justice in the face of bureaucratic indifference, each moment whispers a truth: that doing what is right—no matter how small the gesture—matters. From reclaiming a name on a forgotten document to reclaiming a future stolen by hate, this is a testament to perseverance, authenticity, and the quiet revolution of compassion. We may lose things—identity, faith, freedom—but in seeking them again, we often gain more than we ever imagined.