"It's a Mad, Mad. Mad, Mad World"

 Artificial Intelligence is already here, at least in primitive form. It gathers millions of pieces of data on myriad subjects – all that is available – inputs the data into a CPU and then applies algorithms to answer questions and express opinions. 

I had an interesting experience recently. Last Saturday I sent a write-up on Percival Everett’s latest book, James. Like all my essays, I posted this one on my blog, on LinkedIn and, as I do with book reviews, on Amazon. I have posted at least fifty reviews on Amazon, all of which were accepted. This one was not. An e-mail was sent me, explaining that the review did not meet their guidelines for one of the following reasons: Profanity, Harassment, Hate speech, Sexual content, Illegal activity, Private information. There was no profanity, no sexual content, no illegal activity and no private information. I don’t believe there was any hate speech or harassment; though it is possible that the line where I repeated James request to February to translate a sentence into slave dialect might be read as such. But it only could have been rejected by a machine, something that could read the words but was unable to apply context; or, at least, that is my conjecture. 

 

Artificial Intelligence has a long way to go before it can replicate the human mind and experience. But there is little question that AI will continue to change, whether for better or worse remains to be seen. It will depend on who controls the input.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”

May 15, 2024

 

“Well, we’ve made it this far.”

                                                                                                                From a list of “probable last words.”

 

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

 

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

 

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them? 

 

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In other areas definitions have become confusing. Wikipedia defines a woman: “Typically, women are of the female sex.” Typically, I guess. But not always, “as their gender identity may not align with their sex assignment at birth,” Wikipedia explains. The Federal Government has threatened to withhold funds from public high schools that do not comply with new Title IX rules regarding transgender female athletes – and this is an Administration that claims to care about women’s rights! I guess they mean trans-women’s rights.

 

While officials at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are careful to say that Social Security is not bankrupt, they add, parenthetically, that “in the unlikely event that policy makers fail to act” benefits will be cut by 25% after 2035. Congress, as we all know, is hesitant about amending this 90-year-old entitlement. Keep in mind, life expectancy in the U.S. in1935 was 62 versus 79 today. But nothing to worry about, the age for receiving benefits has risen from 65 in 1935 to 67 in 2023. However, Dan Mitchell of International Liberty predicts that Social Security’s long run shortfall is now $61.7 trillion. Even in a nation with 756 billionaires that is a lot of money. Climate Cassandras are intent on shuttering liquified natural gas exports, even as the U.S. has reduced its carbon output as a percent of GDP, largely due to natural gas replacing coal. The decision is forcing other nations to increase coal output and/or looking to enemy nations, like Russia and Iran, for their energy needs. Those like Greta Thunberg take a “let them eat cake” attitude toward third world nations who are forced to pay more for energy.

 

But what makes the times truly crazy are the choices Americans will likely have in November, when we go to the polls to elect an heir to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan:

 

President Joe Biden – a man in early stages of dementia, a man about whom Robert Gates, Defense Secretary under President Obama, said ten years ago: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Proving Gate’s observation, during Biden’s first term we witnessed the chaotic and costly evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, Russia invade Ukraine and China threaten Taiwan, and now we are abandoning Israel in their Hamas-provoked war for survival. Deficits and debt have risen. Inflation is the highest it has been in forty years. Republicans are expected to nominate former President Donald Trump, a man who reminds one of a carousel barker – a man who has perhaps never read a book, one with the morals of a Billy goat and the mouth of a stevedore. He has promised recrimination against his political rivals. Democrats, however, in their battle to “save democracy,” have helped Mr. Trump, as they use undemocratic means to keep him from office. 

 

The two other minority candidates are scarier. Robert Kennedy, Jr., a scion of Camelot, is no King Arthur. He tells us his brain was eaten by a worm, which, given his antics, feels like it is true. Jill Stein, the perennial candidate of the Green Party, was recently arrested at Washington University in St. Louis for assaulting a police officer – not a good look in a country where crime is on the rise.

 

Why has this great nation fallen so low? Why have absurdities risen so high? Despite an inclination to laugh, this is not a happy time. I don’t pretend to have answers, but I believe an emphasis on identity politics – the division of the people by race, sex, religion, gender and heritage – has played a major role. As well, categorizing people as victims or oppressors is a simplified way of making some people feel good about themselves without having to take responsibility for their actions.  

 

It is a mad world, a world without a moral compass. We wander from crisis to crisis. As the centrifugal forces of today’s culture and politics increase we are pulled to the edges – some to the left and others to the right. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” wrote William Butler Yeats in his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.” The words lend meaning to today’s absence of civility and compromise: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

Despite the craziness, there is little that is fun about the predicament in which we find ourselves – a predicament of our own construction. I don’t know about you, but I need to catch my breath and laugh. When I finish Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, the story of the five months leading to the start of the Civil War, I will take up P.G. Wodehouse’s The Adventures of Sally, a book I haven’t read for several years. As Evelyn Waugh once pointed out, Wodehouse writes of a world “that cannot become dated, because it never existed.” But it is a world in which one can lose oneself, at least temporarily, a world where one laughs with the author at characters who are creations of his brilliant and pleasant mind.

 

We have made it this far; so perhaps we will survive, as the epigraph suggests. The election will take place, but then I think of the giants who have occupied the White House, and I feel a great sorrow. Maybe I will stay home, something I have never done. Probably not, though. We still have over five months to go.

"America is Not a Happy Place"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“America is Not a Happy Place”

February 23, 2024

 

“…happiness depends more upon the internal frame of

a person’s mind than on the externals in the world.”

                                                                                                                George Washington (1732-1799)

                                                                                                                Letter to his mother, Mary Ball Washington

                                                                                                                February 15, 1787

 

“Last Sunday the rain was making a fair imitation of Noah’s flood, so I

stayed in to read the paper. After ten minutes I’d lost the will to live…”

                                                                                                                Tom Cunliffe (1947-)

                                                                                                                British yachting journalist

                                                                                                                Classic Boat, January 2024

 

I am an optimist who looks to the sunny side, no matter personal or national setbacks. However, that attitude has become more difficult when looking at the state of our nation, especially when listening to and reading the news. We are angry. As a white male conservative, I am labeled a white supremacist. We have been divided into victims and victimizers. The individual has been subsumed by his or her identity group. Laughter is hampered for fear of upsetting someone or some group. In colleges and schools, books are censored for fear of being offensive, and safe spaces are offered, including segregated college dorms. The idea of an American mixing bowl has become passé. While George Washington, rightly, warned against “the imposters of pretended patriotism,” love for America is now ridiculed as the refuge of scoundrels, or MAGA Republicans. 65% of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. 

 

A 2021 study in the medical journal The Lancet found that 59% of America’s youth, aged 16-25, were “extremely worried” about climate change. More than half reported feeling sad, angry, helpless, and guilty about the changing climate. Yet the International Disaster Database reports that the number of deaths around the world related to climate change have fallen 98% since 1920. There is no question that climate is changing, as it has for millions of years. Yet the media and climate fearmongers suggest that by altering people’s behavior climate change will cease or moderate. It has become an industry, enriching thousands. Swedish activst Greta Thunberg who has made climate her life’s work, now has an estimated net worth of $18 million – about half from speeches – and travels the world on a 60-foot yacht.

 

According to the CDC, and with the exceptions of 2019 and 2020, suicide rates among Americans have risen every year since 2012. A 2022 study found that 88% of U.S. college students believe there is a mental health crisis on America’s campuses. A recent CDC study found that 13.2% of Americans are on anti-depressants, a 65% increase in the past twenty years. With the death of George Floyd in 2020, “defund the police” became popular and crime increased, especially in Democrat-run cities. 

 

We are told our country was built on the backs of slaves and that European settlers exterminated indigenous populations. There is no denying that slavery existed and that native American tribes were decimated and/or displaced, a history we should not forget. But we should also remember that those early settlers left Europe’s farms, towns and cities, with their homes, stores, and streets, for a desolate wilderness. Most were religious refugees, almost all were poverty-stricken serfs. They left for opportunities and the ability to pray as they chose. As well, ignored is that the Founders created a unique form of government, which provided people with more freedom than was available anywhere else in the world, and which it still does. And disregarded is the fact that immigrants continue to come from almost every country in the world, and that, with the passage of time, they become Americans – not British, French, Germans, Chinese, Ecuadorians, Nigerians, Liberians, Swedes or Indians. They come for the opportunities and freedoms America offers. Over the years, the image of a mixing bowl accurately captured the American experience.

 

Political leaders on the progressive left offer the false assurance of equity – equal outcomes – rather than what America promises – equal rights and opportunity. We are all different. Outcomes rely on ability, aspiration, and diligence; they can never be guaranteed except in a totalitarian state. And none of those states have standards of living approaching that of ours. Guaranteed incomes, free healthcare, and free college tuition sound wonderful but are not possible in the real world, and certainly not in a country where success is based on individual initiative, the rule of law, the right to own property, and free markets. 

 

A recent survey of elites by pollster Scott Rasmussen, conducted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and reported by Michael Barone in The New York Sun, had some surprising findings: 47% of elites and 55% of Ivy League college graduates say the U.S. provides the American people with too much freedom. 75% say that energy, meat, and gas should be rationed to fight climate change. Half those polled would like to ban gas stoves, SUVs and gas-powered cars, despite the high costs of alternatives. Not surprising to those who pay attention to the changing demographics of the political parties, 73% of those polled identify as Democrats. This class divide is a consequence of progressive policies. To put a twist on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line from The Great Gatsby: Today’s rich are different – they have what they don’t want you to have.

 

Optimistic people tend to look to the future, marry and have children. Yet the number of Americans over 18 who have never married rose from 17% in 1970 to 31% in 2021. Fertility rates have halved over the same time. The Pew Research Center, in September 2023, reported that only 4% of Americans believe our political system is working extremely or very well. When asked how they think about politics, 55% say they are angry. Our borders are over-run. Church attendance has plummeted. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lance Morrow wrote that it is not history that is false, it is when “grievance gets stuck in permanent rage, a tradition of hate that forestalls essentials of flourishing life: goodwill, acknowledgement of the facts of progress, the grace of forgiveness and what ought to be the healing effects of time.”  

 

Why are we in this funk? Is there a way out? Each of us will have his or her own answer. In my opinion, the tentacles of octopus-like government have consumed our lives. Our individuality has been sapped. We are members of different groups, be they religious, racial, sexual, or national, yet we are each discrete with varying degrees of aptitude, abilities, aspiration, beliefs, and work ethics. We should not be molded by the group with which we identify. Politicians find it desirable to compartmentalize us into easily identified groups, one source of our funk. Another is the media, more interested in propagandizing than in reporting the news. And a third are elites, those well-educated, woke, and financially well-fixed men and women, who too often express anti-bourgeois behavior as a way to signal their virtue.

 

As for a way out, just because the exit is not obvious does not mean one does not exist. In 1980, after a decade and a half of scandal, war and inflation, a good-natured and humorous Ronald Reagan appeared, who focused on the Soviet Union as the enemy, not Democrats. With luck, such an individual will reappear.  

 

Our Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is a self-evident truth, an unalienable right that has been granted us by our creator. But just as our Constitution emphasizes restraint, our happiness should not be considered boundless, but “bounded liberty, to make wise choices that help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives,” as Jeffrey Rosen put it in The Pursuit of Happiness.  

 

But America is not America when she is not a happy place.

"Dependency - A Form of Subjugation?"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Dependency – A Form of Subjugation?”

November 29, 2019

“Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go;

I owe my soul to the company store.”

                                                                                    Recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford 1955

Slavery is the worst kind of bondage where the individual has no rights and is treated as chattel. It disappeared in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863: “…that all persons held as slave are, and henceforward shall be free.” However, enfranchisement came slowly. It was not until the 19^th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 that women were able to vote. And it was only on August 6, 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enforced the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that had been adopted in 1870. It would be another year before poll taxes – a uniform tax on all individuals regardless of financial means, the payment of which was required in order to register to vote – would be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.

Nevertheless, there are other forms of dependency, not as cruel or degrading as slavery but nonetheless demeaning and inhibiting, like addiction to drugs, alcohol or even social media. And there are forms of dependency that chain individuals to a business, a movement or a state. It is dependency on the state, and all that entails, that concerns this essay.

The elected Washington politician who served because he or she wanted to improve the condition of his or her constituents is a species at risk of extinction. Certainly, there are exceptions, but they have become rare, as the benefits of power, fame and money have grown more ubiquitous for those who serve in Congress. Also, among endangered species is the individual who once traveled to Washington, accepting less pay and longer hours, because he was on a noble enterprise to help fellow citizens. But, with an expanded administrative state, he has become a supercilious, egocentric bureaucrat seeking the monetary and retirement benefits now due a public sector worker.

What has allowed this change to take place? Why is Washington populated with those who more closely resemble Kim Philby than Jimmy Stewart? Government’s bureaucracy has mushroomed in size. We are victims of a public education system more concerned with union demands than instructing our youth, teaching civics, getting students to think independently and acquiring an understanding of the morals embedded in our Constitution. We have a media that no longer serves as an impartial watchdog, having foregone dispassionate investigation for blindfolded advocacy. We have an economy that has made life easier for even the poorest among us, but with the downside of a growing dependence on the state and the loss of dignity that goes with dependency. Independence is no longer seen as something worth fighting and dying for. It has become an opportunity to indulge in hedonistic pleasures, like legally smoking pot, enjoying the lifestyle of the morally corrupt, forgoing the responsibility of parenting, all to satisfy personal egos. We have grown soft with comfort and less willing to endure the hardships necessary to maintain true independence.

In September, the spoiled Swedish teen-ager Greta Thunberg took to the podium at the United Nations and excoriated world leaders, telling them they had betrayed youth through inertia over climate change: “You are failing us.” Did anyone remind her of how capitalism allowed her to be where she was, or the cost of the sailboat on which she traveled to the U.S.? Did anyone tell her that fossil fuels allowed her grandparents to live lives more comfortably than their ancestors, or how gasoline fueled the cars her parents, grandparents and great grandparents drove, and of power generated through fossil fuels that lighted, heated and cooled the homes in which they lived and in which she now lives? Was she reminded that innovation, creativity, risk and reward are critical components to capitalism and necessary for economic growth? Would she prefer the state-mandated policies of socialism or communism rather than capitalism? Would she prefer “Big Brother” monitoring all that she does? We must all be concerned with a changing climate and we should all be environmentally responsible. But the young Miss Thunberg’s attack on world leaders was reminiscent of the accusations by teen-age girls of older women and men in the 1692 Salem witch trials, when an ignorant populous accepted the words of even more ignorant youth.

We saw an exhibition of this ignorance regarding capitalism at the Harvard-Yale football game in New Haven last weekend, when protestors took to the field for almost an hour, demanding their colleges’ endowments divest investments in oil, gas and coal, businesses they claim are destroying the planet. Their protest endangered the players on the field of an unlighted Yale bowl and inconvenienced spectators with an hour delay. Like Miss Thunberg, these protestors overlook economic growth, of which they are the privileged beneficiaries – advancements that have been made because of the energy created from the very sources they want to ban – oil, gas and coal, fossil fuels that heat and cool their homes and college buildings, transport them wherever they want to go and allow the manufacture of products like food, clothing and smart phones that sustain them. None of their comforts would have been possible without fossil fuels. Again, as in Miss Thunberg’s case, we must be conscious of climate change and be environmentally sensitive, but we must also be aware of costs, especially for those less fortunate in poorer communities and in developing countries. In a Monday editorial, the Wall Street Journal quoted a 2013 statement from Harvard’s then president Drew Gilpin Faust: “The endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.” The cost of their education is, in part, subsidized by income from their college’s endowment, an endowment they want to reflect their ephemeral social priorities, not the prudent investments its managers seek.

A citizenry not conversant in history and civics is detrimental to democracy and free-market capitalism. The problem has its genesis in our public schools where social promotion has become accepted policy in big cities, especially those in coastal “blue” states. It is a policy that unfairly targets minorities and the poor and is the embodiment of what President George H.W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a polite term for racism. That many high schools graduate illiterate and innumerate students can be seen in the number of remedial courses in English and math that are needed by high school graduates matriculating at colleges – an education too often given up after one or two years, but with a debt load that binds the student to the “company store” before a career has even begun.

The risk to society of an undereducated electorate is that such people are too easily led by unscrupulous politicians, more concerned with power than the independence and well-being of the people they represent. Ignorance leads to oppression – a subject that has been discussed for over eighty years in dystopian novels, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 415 and Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange.  Huxley provided us the happiness-producing drug soma, used to keep the populace quiet and peaceful; Orwell gave us Winston Smith, The Ministry of Truth and Room 101 for the final stages of reeducation, a place where lawlessness coexisted with binding rules; Bradbury showed us a hedonistic, illiterate society, with endless cycles of life, death in flames and rebirth, and Burgess gave us a preview of the violence that dominates today’s movie and video game culture. Without an understanding of how tyranny arises and with censorship on the rise, lessons from these books have gone unheeded.

The common theme is dependence on the state and the concomitant loss of personal freedom, of accountability and responsibility for one’s actions. Enticing promises of fairness and equality are made, like the commandment of “Old Major” in Animal Farm, that “all Animals are Equal.” The commandment was valid until it no longer applied, when pigs stood on two legs. By the end of the book, when animals outside looked in at pigs and men playing cards, the two were indistinguishable. Yesterday’s rebel became today’s tyrant. Dystopian societies rely on “Thought Police” to maintain order, a concept familiar on college campuses where “group think” is used to combat perceived instances of bias.  

This is not written because of an imminent collapse of our democratic Republic, but because the threat to classical liberalism does not come only from the extreme Right. It is more likely, in my opinion, to stem from the gradual erosion of individual rights and the denial of free expression. Key to a continued and prosperous nation is education – the free exchange of ideas without censorship, where one listens to and entertains all ideas, not just those from one side. Nor do tyrants always appear as cartoon caricatures; they can be gracious and articulate. As I have written before, I have seen nothing from the pugilistic and coarse Mr. Trump that has been as chilling as the 2012 “Life of Julia” video released by President Obama, a video that shows the birth-to-death caring for Julia, dependent on a government cloaked in a false mantle of compassionate concern. Is dependency a form of subjugation? I believe it is. Julia owes her life to the “company store,” in this case the government. Who Will Watch the Watchers? was the title of a book written in 1970 by Edwin Fadiman. With the press having foregone their historic role as guardian of the public interest, it is a question that needs answering. Remember that while we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we don’t always use them. The devil is most dangerous when he hides in plain sight.