First they came for the Reflecting Pool.  Now the Kennedy Center.  And warming up in the wings – the proposed Arch.  You know, in a divorce, when suddenly the color of the curtains becomes this hugely contested issue – that’s what this nonsense is like.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issues at hand, it is just a proxy issue because in reality the parties have grown to hate each other – and refuse to like anything that emanates from the other.  And while it clogs up our media, which has clearly chosen sides, it is also clogging up our courts, and confusing the public about serious

Hasan Piker says that “pound-for-pound” the US is the biggest terrorist nation on earth.  We spent a good deal of the week that ended last weekend examining the moral idiocy that the Lindsey Clancy mistrial made so terribly apparent.  This week we have been consumed with fear over the machines conquering us, as if life was science fiction.  And yet, in the combination of Piker’s seeming lunacy and the moral idiocy revealed in the Clancy situation I see what may be the greatest danger this nation has ever faced.. . .

Have you noticed that in politics the divide between what you see and what you get is often quite wide?  Did Joe Biden really ever function as President or was he just an enfeebled front for some Democrat cabal? L.A. has a horrendous homelessness problem and spends millions, if not billions, to deal with it.  But the problem never gets better.  Where does it all go?  More examples?  Sure…. . .

We all know the story by now, it’s been in a thousand movies – A.I. gains self-awareness and decides mankind is a pestilence and since A.I. controls everything, the world turns against us and we’re done for.  Lately A.I. mavens, in an effort to corner their marketplace and justify their over expenditures of capital raised, have been trying to frighten us with just such a tale. After four or five days of massive media coverage, commentary and discussion, most people are convinced that ain’t happening.  But in the meantime computers, the internet and the latest incarnation of this technology – A.I.

I have not researched every branch of religion or philosophy, but the oldest apocalyptic tale I can remember is Noah and the flood.  That’s a tale that predates the written word – it is thousands (in written form), if not tens of thousands (in oral form), of years old.  The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is between 2000 and 3000 years old and it talks of the end of everything in apocalyptic terms.  Let’s keep going with this…. . .

It’s funny how all the AI developers have come out recently to tell us that AI is going to kill us.  I think the time has come to start asking some very fundamental questions about this whole deal.  Let’s start with what should be a simple one – Why is all this AI development happening in the business sphere and not the academic one?  Think about it – these are all Silicon Valley start-ups doing this work, not the super computing lab at ORNL or some university lab.  Now ask yourself the follow-up – What is their business?  What are they selling?. . .

Yesterday I chronicled, rather starkly, the moral erosion of the last several decades and in so doing we discovered that the fact so many are willing to excuse Lindsey Clancy’s murderous rampage is not really all that shocking.  But I did not explore what is perhaps the saddest portion of that narrative – the church’s participation in that erosion.  Let’s dive in.. . .

John Hinderraker when the news broke yesterday that the “holdout” juror on the Lindsey Clancy case was African-American: “What a wonderful encapsulation of our benighted era: a gaggle of middle-aged, liberal white women trying to bully a black man. I wonder whether he went to college–perhaps not, which may explain why he is not a moral idiot.”  Such intemperate language from a lawyer is unusual, but it raises an interesting question – How did we get to a place where eleven of twelve jurors could be “moral idiots?”. . .