Free Republic

The CPU is smarter than you. Knowing how government works, I suspect that the default will be brakes on, unless the car’s computer reports that the system is functional. That said, I am sure that we will be able to buy something on eBay — made in China, of course — which we can plug-in to defeat the system.

If we do not yet have even a good theory concerning the nature of consciousness, I am puzzled as to how we could declare a computer sentient. I suppose it then comes down to what we mean when we use the word consciousness, and at the moment the Turning Test is good as any definition.

I recall Iranian students at GW University in the mid ‘70s protesting the moral decay of U.S. culture. “What did we know of the quickie before we came here?”was on one of their banners.

Certainly, you remember "This is a test! This is only a test! If this were a real emergency, you would be instructed to ...". You probably also remember those small triangles on the AM radio dial, marking the CONALRAD frequencies. These were examples of how seriously the prospect of nuclear bombardment was taken in the '50s. It was a time of opposites. Yes, there was optimism that we would all live in a Jetson's future with rocket cars and enjoy a cure for any disease. At the same time, we built fallout shelters, and post-apocalyptic dramas like On the Beach (1959) were taken as sagely prophetic.

One of the most interesting shifts in our popular thought occurring in the '50s was the skepticism which arose concerning science. This was directly related to the atomic bomb, which although it ended WW2, was generally seen as a great threat now that other countries had it. Consider, for example, the 1934 film Things to Come in which science defeats barbarism and elevates mankind. Now, compare that with Howard Hawks' The Thing (1951) where the pursuit of science is characterized as dangerous, destructive, and anti-social. Note that the scientist foil - who wears a goatee and is clearly foreign - in The Thing is willing to endanger everyone's life in pursuit of pure science. Where once we trusted science and scientists completely, in the '50s the wheel was turning and we had a more skeptical view of its benefits.

I lived through the ‘50s and remember it as being impossibly different than what we have become today. (1) There were ridged standards of dress, behavior, and expectations. Men wore hats and women wore dresses on most occasions. My father put on a suit to go to the auto parts store, and I never saw my mother in a pair of pants, ever. (2) In some ways there was less division between classes. Buying a house was far easier, but not everyone could afford a TV. Gas was 15 cents a gallon and that price included an attendant who pumped it and checked your oil. However, it was far tougher if you were penniless or unemployed. (3) There was a strong undercurrent of pessimism about the future, not present today. We were trained at school to shelter under our desks in case of a nuclear attack, which most people considered inevitable, especially when China got the bomb. There were frequent, often monthly, practice air raid alarms and every city had nearby shelters stocked with food and water. Part of this anxiety produced a deep distrust of science, and especially foreign-born scientists. We were, as Tennessee Williams put it, “A world waiting for bombardment”. (4) As Americans, we were secure in our culture and had no doubt that we were the best and strongest society in the world. We envied others nothing, except their exotic food on occasion. (5) Amid all this stability, we were restless for something different. Eisenhower was often viewed as a do-nothing president who spent his time golfing apart from governing. This set the stage for the explosive ‘60s, and all the rapid change which has followed.

All of my teen aged friends in the ‘60s had those cars. Myself, I had a sequential string of used Triumphs, a TR2, a TR3, two Spitfires, and eventually a TR4. Sometimes we worked for them, sometimes our parents bought them for us. I don’t recall paying more than $700 for any of those Triumphs.

I've taken awhile to ponder that statement and consider it from multiple angles. It is wrong. The '60s was nothing other than the Boomers coming into their own. It was Boomers who turned the Beatles demigods. It was Boomers who were buying the Mopar muscle cars, the Mustangs, the GTOs, the Trans Ams, and Firebirds in the '60s. It was Boomers who were either being drafted or protesting the war, and sometimes both. It was Boomers who were into psychodelia, drugs, long hair, bell bottoms, and all the music from the mid-'60 to the mid-'70s. These things created the culture of that decade, apart from its politics.

Those who came of age in the '60s will recall the opening lines of A Tale of two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Life, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way". How true.

Having lived through the ‘60s, I understand the significance of JFK’s election, but was not the number one cause of the decade, but rather an effect. Demographics was the prime cause of the ‘60s. The huge Boomer generation was coming of age at the same time older people were anxious to move on from the age of Eisenhower and the greatest generation. I actually met Kennedy at a campaign rally he held at Montgomery Blair H.S. A little more than two years later, I was standing outside of the Bethesda Naval Hospital watching his body arrive in a grey ambulance.

He’s going to have to lead in the so-called mail-in ballot sector of any state to have a chance.

There is usually something amiss with most people out of any large sample, if you look hard enough. As Dorothy Parker put it, the only normal people are those you don’t know well enough.

Actually, I hope Biden follows the Atlantic’s advice, because, ironically, a debate would be a great boost for Biden. By this time most people know that Biden is a senile, rambling, incompetent, wreck. That is now the general impression after four years of comical examples. However, through some powerful pharmacological magic he can be made to seem coherent and even vigorous for at least the few hours of the debate. This brief medical cabaret would trick people into thinking that his condition is much better than it actually is and that he is someone who he is not.

I once asked a park ranger at the Grand Canyon how many people a year fell. He said about a dozen, almost all teenaged boys.

Colbert deserves the universal heckle. “Get a job!”

George Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Politics and the English Language.” I recommend it for many reasons: not only is it a beautiful example of Orwell’s clear and precise writing, but also because it makes the point that English is composed of two entwined linguistic roots. One is French or Romance derived largely from Latin, and the other is Germanic, having nothing to do with Latin. He points out that in English we often have two words for the same thing, one French and the other Germanic. A pond or a point can be clear (Germanic) or lucid (French). That same pond thought it can be deep (Germanic) or profound (French). These synonyms are used adroitly by politicians. When they want their rhetoric to be strong and motivational, they use Germanic words. When they want to diffuse something they are describing, or blur an inconvenient truth, they will choose the French or Latin derived words, which, as Orwell put it, tend to cover over and obscure the facts like a blanket of fresh snow.

Someone in the Iranian chain of command has to give the order to launch those missiles, but the IDF has just demonstrated that they will strike command level personnel wherever they might be found. I suspect that this was part of Israel’s calculation in assessing the odds of a counterstrike.

The question is what do the Russians expect to happen if their public blames the US for the massacre. The reasonable assumption that they will then support an attack on the U.S. This is what Sputnik/Putin is laying a foundation for.

I am going to guess that the settlement included payment of the plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs. That is, on top of the 50K. It just wasn’t mentioned in the article, but payment of fees and costs is part of civil rights statute they sued under.

Of course, taxpayers will pay. Who else could? But look what we’ll get for our money: not only a monstrously over-engineered wonder — which is not a bad thing — with bike paths, and lanes for the handicapped and pregnant mothers, but also one constructed wholly with union labor at twice the cost, most likely from foreign steel, all done after enormous tranches of money are disbursed for countless superfluous environmental studies. And to crown that, we’ll get a bridge not named after a white slave-owner who died centuries ago, but some modern, woke, what-have-you, which will satisfy our universal desire to signal our virtue and feel good. What a deal!

It is interesting that this happened in Queensland and not in New South Wales or Victoria, which are, for the most part, woke, even by our Pacific Coast standards. Aside from a few very nice tourist areas, like Port Douglas, Queensland is a manly place where you’ll find man-eating crocodiles in the smallest puddles, and big Harleys and Kawasakis everywhere, whereas NSW and Victoria are overrun with 50cc scooters, to give you a sense of their priorities and preferences.

I took the AMTRACK from D.C. to NYC last week, something I had not done for five years. The train passes through the worst parts of Baltimore, with block after block of abandoned row houses, all boarded up and in horrible condition on either side of the track. This time, however, I was surprised at how many of them had been renovated and were now in very good shape. There were still lots of them which had not changed, but to see a significant number that had been reclaimed made me wonder if it was just speculators, or if this was the result of one of those $1 sale programs.