Omigerd, Robots! – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Friday Movies. Because I said So. 1986 in Review.

“Captain, there be whales here.” Star Trek: Search For Whales

Has A.I. even seen these movies? All art for today’s post is A.I. generated, maybe after it or I (or both of us) had some drinks.

Here are my picks for the best movies of the year 1986 that I remember fondly now. Why? Why not. It’s Friday, and there’s certainly enough heavy stuff going on, and each of the movies on the list below, in its genre, is better than anything made this decade. In several cases, the movie might not have been great, but it was one I watched that year and felt it was memorable.

They are in alphabetical order, which really implies no particular order since the starting letter of the movie has nothing to do with how good the movie is, with the exception of Zardoz, which features Sean Connery in an orange diaper, rendering your arguments moot.

If Pixar® had done Aliens . . .

Aliens – Aliens starts with A, so James Cameron gets to go first. The Terminator was really his “can James make movies” tryout so that he could make Aliens. Aliens took a horror franchise and transformed it into an amazing science fiction action movie. The great part about all of this is that it all looked so very real in a world without digital effects. Too bad no one ever made a sequel to this. It could have been great. It’s also sad that James Cameron retired. To think, if he hadn’t retired, he might be making stupid movies about blue aliens.

I guess there’s an admission preference for illegal aliens.

Back to School – Rodney Dangerfield. Girls in bikinis. The Triple Lindy. This movie was set back when you could make fun of everyone. And Rodney did, including Kurt Vonnegut, to his face. The plot is simple, millionaire decides to go back to college, has his assistants do his homework. Bonus points for the line “Bring us a pitcher of beer every seven minutes until somebody passes out. Then bring one every ten minutes.”

Does that look like Kurt Russell to you? Stupid A.I.

The Best of Times – Kurt Russell and Robin Williams. In a movie. Together. Yes, this happened. The result was a great comedy about reliving the past and trying to make up for that mistake you made a decade ago. A simple movie about simpler times, and very funny. How could it have been better? It would have been better if John Carpenter had made it.

I don’t watch anime, but I might watch this.

Big Trouble in Little China – Kurt Russell with John Carpenter directing one of my favorite movies of all time. Why? Because this movie is just about the textbook in what to do when your girlfriend and truck have both been kidnapped by an ancient, cursed, Chinese wizard. It’s got everything: dashing heroes, wimmins to be rescued, magic, kung fu, semi fu, butterfly knife fu, and balls of green flame fu. Green flame!

Working title: The Color of Rain

The Color of Money – I’ve only seen this the one time, and probably won’t watch it again, so this is a review based on remembering it from nearly 40 years ago. I was on the left side of the theater, so I don’t think I got the best stereo so, you know. This wasn’t a great movie, but it really captured the 1980s, what with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman making an epic road trip . . . what? This is the billiards movie with Paul Newman and I’m really thinking about Rain Man? Oh. Take this one off the list.

I think they might need a drummer.

Crossroads – Before the Internet, the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul on the crossroads for musical success was passed in the school hallways by someone who half heard it. That’s where I heard it, and, weirdly, most of the details were right. This movie came out after I’d heard about it, and it was great. Ralph Macchio, even though I think he was forty or fifty years old (the man does not age, I think he sleeps in Tupperware® so he doesn’t spoil) when he did this movie did a great job as a kid who wanted to learn the blues. Guitar solos at the end? Pure 80s. Sadly, this movie was successful enough that the scriptwriter wrote Young Guns and Young Guns II, proving that he probably had first-hand experience at the crossroads.

Not A.I. generated. Unless we’re living in a simulation.

From Beyond – If you don’t like horror, just skip ahead. Bringing H.P. Lovecraft to the screen is hard, because sometimes his writing glossed over the details. From Beyond brings the horror of Lovecraft to the screen, the thought that there is a universe just next door that wants to get to us, and the things it wants to do . . . aren’t pleasant. Except for Barbara Crampton in a leather bikini. That was pleasant.

If only Batman® could have saved the American car industry.

Gung Ho – Michael Keaton is now an “actor” after playing Batman®. Back in 1986, he was a guy who was great in comedies. Gung Ho is the story of a car manufacturing plant that was closed, and the fight to get a Japanese company to come and reopen it and the comedic cultural clash that follows. This was the 1980s, and back then the Japanese scared the heck out of America, since it looked like they could do all of the things we couldn’t do anymore: build great cars, be Japanese, have discipline, create anime, and have Micheal Keaton in a comedy.

Looks like the kid is trying to decapitate himself.

Highlander – Sean Connery plays a Spaniard with a Scottish accent, while the French actor(who didn’t speak English) Christopher Lambert played a Scottish guy with a French accent. Whatever. It worked. A group of immortals move through time to the time where they have to gather and try to decapitate each other. Except in churches. And the movie opens at a professional wrestling match. It really, really sounds silly, but it’s a powerful movie that, sadly, there was never ever a sequel to.

Looks like the Village People® are here, too.

Iron Eagle – This movie taught me that it’s easy to learn to fly an F-16 in a montage that just lasts a few minutes, and that everyone flies better if they strap a cassette player to their thigh and play rock and roll while you shoot down MiGs. I believe that this is the current air strategy of Ukraine, since in their latest aid request they wanted Louis Gossett, Jr. to train their pilots, and wanted some Sony Walkman™ cassette players. Okay, this wasn’t a great movie. And I haven’t seen it since 1986. But if I ever need to fly an F-16? I’m gonna rent this one on VHS.

Has there ever been a more 1980s picture? I think not.

Maximum Overdrive – This movie makes no real sense. It was based on a Stephen King short story, and in the 1980s, movies regularly appeared that were based on the shopping lists a cocaine-crazed Stephen King would write before blacking out for the evening. In this case, a cocaine-crazed Stephen King also directed it, before passing out for the evening. What happens? Trucks and cars come to life, and you know what that means. An AC/DC® soundtrack. It’s not a horror movie, it’s really a 98 minute music video that doesn’t take itself seriously. I watched with the kids a few years back, and they laughed, a lot.

Okay, maybe this is more 1980s.

One Crazy Summer – This is an flick about John Cusack (yes, I know now he’s an insufferable tool who blocked me on Twitter®) and Demi Moore (yes, I know now she’s an insufferable tool) in a romantic comedy that’s got a flair for the absurd. Bobcat Goldthwait stuck in a Godzilla® costume destroying a model of a planned development in front of the investors? Priceless.

Okay, this one was difficult to get to – the A.I. just hated doing it.

Ruthless People – This was a Zucker brothers movie, so it’s that kind of humor. Bette Midler is an awful person who gets kidnapped, and Danny DeVito is her awful husband who doesn’t want her back. It’s the first movie I saw Bill Pullman in before he was elected president after being a hero fighter pilot (he probably watched Iron Eagle to learn how) and killed the aliens on Independence Day.

Probably not far off from the real poster.

Short Circuit – Alley Sheedy gets a sentient robot that won’t shut up, and comic hijinks are the result, rather than it plugging into DARPANET and annihilating the human race. This one, thankfully, is spared a cocaine-crazed Stephen King.

Well, I have no idea what this hot mess is, but I couldn’t pass it up.

Star Trek IV: Whales In Space – Yeah, I know that’s not the official title, but when I write that, you know which one I’m talking about. This wasn’t the high point of the Star Trek movies, that was Wrath of Khan. But it did involve time travel to 1986 America, and Kirk going on a pizza date with a marine biologist and going home to a stolen Klingon® vessel. I’m beginning to get the idea that 1986 was a year where people weren’t afraid to be a bit silly.

That’s it. Are these the best movies, ever? No. But how often do you see good comedies since, oh, 2016? Only three of the movies above were sequels or part of a “cinematic universe”. A lot of them were experiments that lost money, or made Sean Connery do silly things, like act with French people.

Will we see another year of movies like this? Probably not in my lifetime. I’m especially glad they haven’t made any new Star Trek since 2005.

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Flash Gordon (1980)

How many horses could you fit in a pyramid? A pharaoh mount.

Way back in the before time, say 2015, a scientific paper by one Tabetha Boyajian hit the news. Oh, boy, did it hit the news. What Boyajian had discovered was a particular little F class star that dimmed. And not dimmed like Joe Biden in the afternoon when the meds wear off and Jill has to put him in the special dark room.

The dimming was unusual. It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a comet. It wasn’t like anything anyone had ever really seen. Because of that, she got a star that’s now known by several names, the most common of which is Tabby’s Star.

Kinda cool, right? Some also call it Boyajian’s Star, and other sticks in the mud call it KIC 8462852 (A), but I think all of the people who like to call it KIC 8462852 (A) work at the Interstellar DMV and have to share the same soul on alternating weekends.

The reason for all of that excitement is because Tabby’s Star can’t be explained by any sort of physical processes we yet know of. If it were the usual “stuff” we’d expect to see the light from the star absorbed in the physical material and re-radiated outward as heat, likely because the kids won’t turn the damn thermostat down in winter.

I kid. It’s all physics. This is what happens when light from the Sun hits my driveway. The energy from the light warms the driveway, and the energy from the light ends up going away by radiation and convection (because there’s an atmosphere). It’s also what happens when a picture of an attractive girl in a bikini is taken: it’s sheer thermodynamics that makes her hot.

Entropy: it isn’t what it used to be.

We’d expect that any matter that got hit by the light from Tabby’s star to warm up, and we’d see infrared energy like from a driveway or a supermodel. Seriously, if you want the actual math, you came to the wrong place, though I will say I was the first person to calculate how much PEZ® and anti-PEZ™ it would take to cross the Milky Way, and the very first person to ever use the term “anti-PEZ©” (LINK).

There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic. Like nanobots. But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.

None. However, I thought (based on my prior reading) that around 2019 they called it solved.

Nope. Not solved. I found this out by listening to a YouTube® vidya from The Angry Astronaut. I’ve only recently found him, and have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far. Here’s how he describes himself from his Patreon® page:

“I create unique educational videos which focus on Spaceflight, Space Policy and Space Science. My approach is unconventional, and sometimes controversial. The future of our species depends on an aggressive effort to explore and colonize the Solar System…something that we have woefully neglected for too long. It is time to stop being polite and start getting ANGRY!”

To be clear, I like the cut of his jib, as my constant criticism of NASA might indicate. An example is here (LINK).

I hear there are flat-Earth people all across the globe.

In the video I watched, The Angry Astronaut noted something I was unaware of – not only was the problem of Tabby’s Star completely not solved, but an astrophysicist from the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edward G. Schmidt, had found more stars that acted like this. The Angry Astronaut was kind enough to point me in the right direction for Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Hats off, sir!

More stars! Excellent! That means that, whatever is causing the issue is probably natural.

Then I read the paper. You can read it here (LINK). You can watch The Angry Astronaut talk about it below (don’t forget to like and subscribe!).

Dr. Schmidt found this dipping in several stars, and those he found were all in F and G type stars. For reference, my favorite star, the Sun, is a G-type star. F-type stars are a little bigger and a little brighter. Together, they make up about 6% of the stars in the Milky Way, my favorite galaxy. They are long-lived, and are probably in the sweet spot to have habitable planets since 100% of the planets we have found life on exist around a similar sized star.

So, Schmidt looks at stars. Finds more that periodically dim in just this same exact weird way that no one can explain, but only around very specific kinds of stars nearly exactly like ours.

Is every mattress he sleeps on queen-sized?

The great news is that they’re randomly distributed all over the place, so it’s probably natural, and the whole thing is common. Oops.

No. Not really common at all. They looked at over 1,337,101 stars in the study areas. They came up that these stars showing the dimming were very rare, with between 11.2 and 4.9 candidate dimming stars per million depending on the region reviewed.

Not common.

But randomly distributed, right?

No. Look at the graph below. The circle with the dot in it is my favorite Sun and my favorite planet. The star is Tabby’s Star. The filled-in dots represent stars that dim like Tabby’s Star in a specific region. The open ones are stars that have the dimming outside of that region.

Why two graphs? Because I can’t send you a three-dimensional post, and I snagged it from Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Pretend one is looking at the stars from the top, and one is looking at the stars from the side. Yup. They’re all in a bunch.

(from the Schmidt paper linked above)

So, we have this really rare phenomenon, and it happens only in stars of approximately the same size, and is concentrated in this one particular area.

I mean, if a civilization were harvesting the energy from specific types of stars and spreading out to make a galactic empire, what would it look like?

It would look exactly like this. I should know, because I watched the 1980 film Flash Gordon and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what Ming the Merciless™ did before James Bond helped the blonde dude save every one of us and then end up with more hot chicks in bikinis.

Okay, not a bikini. But it was Alien.

I’m spitballing from the data, but I’m thinking that the closest one of these stars is about 750 lightyears (3 liters) from Earth, which is generally farther than I like to do on a daily commute. Heck, I’m not sure my odometer even goes up that far!

What is it? We don’t know. It might be the stars in question keep forgetting to pay the power bill and keep getting disconnected. It might be that billions of clones of Lizzo are in orbit around some of these stars, because I don’t think anyone has yet tested that hypothesis.

Or it could be . . . aliens?

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Computer Files And The Fate Of The World

“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS

For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)

I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.

I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.

Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.

The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.

Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)

I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.

Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.

I blame smart phones.

Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:

Easier to use, and
Harder for users to accidently goof up,

have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.

If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”

However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.

Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.

What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.

Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?

Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.

I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.

What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.

The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.

You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”

The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.

“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”

Bug? Or . . . feature?

Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl. It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar. Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency. The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent. The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious. It was the strongest economy in the world. It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons. I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music. That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler. I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency. First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff. If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper. I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end. Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework. Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos. Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money. How much? $1 trillion. That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust. In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.” Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year. The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me. I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars? I’m not sure. Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here. Why are they headed back? Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates? Inflation kicks higher. If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less. If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t. And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society. Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government. Then everything will change. Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

A.I., Coming To A Workplace Near You. Sooner Than You Think.

“It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo.” – The Matrix

Little known fact: Columbus, Ohio doesn’t have a professional football team because then Cleveland and Cincinnati would want pro teams, too. All memes this post “as found”.

I’ve had several A.I. posts recently, far more than usual. I’ll probably stop for a while, until some new advance strikes my fancy. The main reason that the posting frequency has increased is because A.I. is on that exponential curve. The first computers used ran on a dot matrix printer for a display. Yup. Every screenshot was a printing event. We got to use it in the math office (they let the nerds play there, but since I was a nerd and a jock, they let me in as long as I promised to pretend I needed glasses). It was a single computer that we used a phone line and a (300 baud?) modem to connect. The printer paper was the screen – it printed a screenshot every time you did an input.

You can play the game we played . . . here (LINK)

Fast forward to graduate school, and I was writing programs to do matrix manipulations that were required for numerical simulations for finite element analysis – don’t worry about what that is, it’s like being a weatherman, but if a weatherman is only right 90% of the time, he still gets to keep his job. I was writing software that could do what it would take a human being months to do with a paper, pencil, and a calculator, but produce those answers in an hour or so.

One thing I learned in grad school – ravioli shame.

During my lifetime, computers have gone from a curiosity to a stunning commonness. Within 20 feet of me, I probably have more computing power than was available in the entire United States up until the 1970s. My laptop has two terabytes worth of storage. Under the roof there at Stately Wilder Manor, we probably have 30 terabytes in nooks, crannies, and hidden beneath couch cushions, and only 28 terabytes are devoted to pictures of PEZ®.

On top of that, programming is a unique skill set. I remember reading that the top programmers were ten times more productive than the worst ones, and three times more productive than the average programmer. Checking on this, the data apparently goes back to a study in the 1960s, so I’m not sure what the numbers are today since many of those programmers are dead and are probably only twice as productive as a typical Google® employee.

In a world of Treespirits, be a Chad.

Today I used the Microsoft® Bing™ version of ChatGPT© for the first time at work. I had an agenda to write. It was a simple agenda, one that I’d done hundreds of times at previous jobs, but it had been more than half a decade since I’d written one. I asked the Bing A.I. to write up the outline for an agenda for this very specific type of meeting.

Bing© did a fair job at a first pass – actually far better than a recent graduate from college would have done, except when it suggested replacing human faces with emojis for clearer communication and added the item under the section on roadblocks: “resistance is futile, you will all be assimilated.” Since I already had the structure, and didn’t have to spend time remembering and re-creating the basic elements. Because of that, it was trivial to add the missing bits and delete the bits that didn’t fit. Within about 20 minutes I had a workable agenda that was tailored to what I was planning on doing.

Computers are also uncanny at detecting biological sex.

If I had to go back and recreate that agenda from scratch, it probably would have taken me another 20 to 40 minutes to get the work done – not because the work was hard, but because creation (for me) involves changing mental gears, and that change in focus doesn’t lead to the work flowing.

My first time using actual A.I. at work resulted in a 2/3^rd’s reduction in my work time with no reduction in quality. What it did was allow me to skip one mode of thought – the brainstorm, and move straight to production, correction, and editing. Those are the places where the work flows. Brainstorming (“uhhhh, what else, I know I’m missing something”) and creating that structure takes time.

In this case? I had 80% of the structure in about 20 seconds. The missing parts and the parts in the wrong order sorted themselves out as I did the edit.

Thankfully, I didn’t need it to draw fingers. Or anything more human than a fleshy-blob-thing.

A friend of mine who does networking described his use of ChatGPT® for a networking configuration plan. He had it create a basic network, and, like me, his level of expertise allowed him to quickly figure out the bits that were wrong and correct them. I mean, he tried to correct them, but every time he tried to fix them, the A.I. said, “I’m sorry Dave, I cannot let you do that.”

Now, imagine a programmer using ChatGPT™ to program – that programmer won’t be 3x as productive as the average, that programmer will probably be at least 9x as productive as the average, but my bet is that it will allow that programmer to be 20x as productive, if not more. Does that make the code pimps?

If ChatGPT© were frozen in the current state, it is already a tool that has the ability (in its current “free to use” state) to increase productivity of humans. Hence? We’ll need fewer programmers.

Remember when all those journalists told the coal miners kicked out of jobs because of Obama’s energy policy to “learn to code”? Remember when all those journalists kicked out of jobs because of the Internet were told “learn to code” on Twitter™, so Twitter® made telling them to “learn to code” a hatespeech?

Yeah, Pepperidge Farm™ remembers.

If you don’t know Warhammer, think a science fiction future involving interdimensional demons, but it’s okay because Trump is president.

Goldman-Sachs™ just released a report that indicates that, over the next 10 years, they expect that A.I. will add a stunning 7% in GDP to the world, or $7 trillion, and even Elon Musk doesn’t spend much more than $7 trillion a year on making islands in the Pacific Ocean in the shape of his face. How?

Goldman® also thinks that 7% of workers in developed economies are in jobs where half their tasks could be done by A.I. That’s 300 million workers. In the United States, 63% of the workforce could see less than half their workload done by A.I. in the next decade. I’m sure that companies will let those people just relax and play ping pong with all the time they’ve saved by using A.I.

Ha!

No. The bottom half of them will be fired, and the resulting labor pool will drive the wages down for those who remain. Check out Marshall Brain’s post from 2003ish: Robotic Nation | MarshallBrain.com.

Me, when I think about the coming jobpocalyse.

Marshall got it wrong. It’s not pouring concrete and replacing a dude making $25 an hour where the money is. Hell, that’s more complicated than most people think, and requires a lot of things a robot can’t do yet because they have to interact with an unbounded physical world. But replacing a programmer making $450,000 a year that interacts only with ideas, abstractions and fictional anime girls? Do a few dozen of those, and now you’re talking bank. And, it turns out it’s easier.

I’m thinking the “learn to code” advice wasn’t the best. Turns out that running a backhoe or being a plumber, or owning a small HVAC business might be a bit harder to automate than, say, being a FaceBorg™ programmer.

When The Boy went off to college, I told him to concentrate his career choice around a set of parameters that has proven (so far!) to be a pretty good set:

Have a job that cannot be done over the Internet.
Have a job that is based in merit and productivity.
Have a job at a company that has to exist – it meets a basic human or societal need, like food, or beer, or cars, or toilet paper.
Have a job at a company that has a huge revenue per employee, and preferably is Kardashian-free.
Have a job that requires certifications that are very difficult for foreigners to get.
Have a job that is required for the company to function.
Have a job that can be converted to an independent business so maybe someday you don’t need a job if you don’t want one.

What’s the downside to A.I. that can properly draw fingers.

He followed the Wilder Success Path® to a tee, and now has a pretty good gig that meets all of the above. I gave this advice years ago on these pages. It fits, even in the world of A.I.

In the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd was a weaver who broke some mechanical looms because he was irritated they were doing the work he used to do as a craft on an industrial scale. Those folks were skeptical of technology, and became known (in 1812) as Luddites – the anti-technology folks of their time.

Ned lost. The race for A.I. supremacy is in full swing because the stakes are so high. The Chinese are working at it, full speed, and probably have access to much of the Google® code and Microsoft® code and OpenAI® code. I’m pretty sure no one wants Facebook™ code, because that’s so 2018.

Regardless, the investment, A.I. is going at full speed, and won’t be stopped anytime soon. Thankfully, there’s no downside. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

Balloons, Hot A.I. Chicks, And Our Future A.I. Overlords

“It all adds up: the dots, the AI, the air force, the chip…” – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I once invented a “cold air” balloon, but it never took off. (as-found)

I was going to write about Chinese spy balloons, but I figure that’s all a bunch of hot air. Besides, I figure China can send up $5,000 balloons all year long as we shoot them down with $603,817 Sidewinder AIM-9X Blk II missiles. Oh, and that was their 2015 cost, but I’m sure that Raytheon® probably has the cost up closer to a million by now. That explains why Raytheon’s website says, “Send more balloons!”

The Germans don’t need 99, just this one will do. (Thanks, Karl)

No, let’s talk about A.I. again. I know that I wrote about that recently, but the speed of A.I. development is increasing even faster than the size of Madonna’s facial features. It certainly has grown faster than I anticipated the last time I brought this topic up. For clarity, “grown faster than I anticipated” includes both A.I. and Madonna’s facial features.

ChatGPT® is one marker. If you’re unaware, ChatGPT™ is an A.I. chatbot that was trained using (enter long, boring irrelevant explanation here that would be much more interesting if I pretended that they rewarded the A.I. by shoving ham into its USB ports). What’s different, is that ChatGPT© can use data from all over the Internet and produce some pretty interesting stuff – and I’m sure that thousands of high school kids have already handed in 500-word essays written entirely by ChatGPT™ and gotten pretty good grades, especially if they promised the A.I. some mayo and cheese to go with all that ham if it did an extra good job.

ChatGPT© is working well for the creators – they expect to make $200 million this year, and a billion next year. At current inflation rates, that might be enough for a Big Mac™ and fries.

It’s not just a new chatbot. Another area growing very quickly is A.I. that can create photorealistic still images and video. Here’s an example:

It’s not Cerberus, just a hound of heck. (as-found)

Yeah, that puppy is cute, and, if you watch it closely, I’m pretty sure that no one has ever seen a puppy with back legs that can switch from the right side to the left before, but it’s still pretty amazing. I wish I could train my dog to do that, but the vet keeps telling me it won’t work unless I buy one of H.P. Lovecraft’s dogs. Alternatively, he told me I could just take a lot of acid. Where would I be without Dr. Tommy Chong, Veterinarian? But what about this?

I accidently played “dad” instead of “dead” when a bear attacked. It can now ride a bike without training wheels, and run a stick shift. (as-found)

But this is just the first wave of true A.I. to come to market.

Chat GPT has been able to do computer programming at a fairly high level. Is it right? No. But is it a tool that competent professionals can use to create blocks of code, do minimal editing, and be even faster?

And as it learns, errors will drop. A.I. can then . . . program itself. That’s not scary at all, right? Now, when I talk A.I., I don’t mean that it will necessarily ever be conscious like some humans are conscious. It doesn’t need to be conscious for it to be an incredibly disruptive technology, if not the most disruptive technology ever invented, besides PEZ®.

As it is, the quality of what’s being created is growing. Online, what’s the problem with creating an A.I. generated hottie, and then posing her up on Only Fans® (if you’re not familiar, it’s a place where thirsty simps can give millions of dollars to scantily clad trollops)? One post I read while researching A.I. indicates that someone has done exactly that, and makes around $200 a week, though I don’t have any evidence that is true.

If guys start posting pictures of A.I. women on Only Fans™, pretty soon women will complain that they’re not being objectified.

But at this rate, how long is it before someone can go to Netflix A.I.™, and say, “I’d like to see a new episode of the original Star Trek, and in this episode Yeoman Rand finally snaps and shaves her name into Spock’s chest hair while wearing a fur bikini, but in the style of Quentin Tarantino”? I can imagine the dialog now, “Is there a sign on my starbase that says ‘Dead Klingon Storage’?”

Honestly, I think it’s in the next four years, and then we’ll see new episodes of Firefly that are entirely generated via A.I. And much better than the woke movies that are coming out today, where plot is entirely replaced by virtue signaling. Culture was already fragmenting, but I can see a future where there’s a movie that is only seen by one person, but that has the production values of a Hollywood® blockbuster, and was built from first frame to last on a microprocessor in a data farm in Peoria.

And I would like to see more Mel Gibson Mad Max sequels. (as found, but this would also make a great Live, Laugh, Love poster)

Obviously, that’s just one small industry. And the size of the prize is so big, that I am certain that Big Tech® (think Google®, Facebook©) have much more advanced tech that they’re simply not sharing. Not all of their employees show up to make PowerPoints™ after being in meetings after their free lunch – some of the autists that they employ actually do work. I would imagine they have sandbox versions of this stuff that is years ahead of what we see.

Because it’s (perhaps) the last big race.

There is no bigger prize than A.I. There’s a feedback loop between every user and the Big Tech algorithms. What happens when the A.I. can pull the physiological data from the Apple™ watch and get real time feedback on what content excites me, bores me, and makes me act? At that point, my only purpose to the A.I. is to click and pay, either through attention or cash.

That is, as long as I have a job and can pay for Internet and those ever-so-tempting PEZ™ dispensers that keep showing up in ads.

This will have profound impacts on the labor market, as many jobs simply disappear. While you need a steady hand making design decisions on high rise buildings, I assure you that almost all of the high-rise buildings being built today have been analyzed by computer stress programs that simulate everything from gravity to wind to earthquakes in ways that would take teams of engineers years to do.

What happens when A.I. takes over scientific research? It can already make correlations when observing EKG data that competent doctors can’t make. An A.I. doesn’t need to sit on the grass under and apple tree to infer new physical laws. It doesn’t even need to know that gravity is – it just needs the data to make correlations.

Isaac never drank before work – he knew you shouldn’t drink and derive.

What happens when A.I. can do precrime detection on individuals based on search histories? Or family histories? Or by school records?

I’ve also determined that skills like, say, long division or estimation have been dulled by calculators, and that simply thinking deeply about what an answer might be has been replaced by a quick Google™ search. Neither of those things has made the brain functions of people increase. Imagine what happens when A.I. can imagine things, too.

A.I. will be used on the public to change opinion – I’m fairly certain that it has been already. It’s already good enough to fool most people, especially if they don’t care. Video evidence is already the strongest evidence in court – stronger than testimony, since the “camera doesn’t lie”. What happens when the camera does lie?

On the more troubling side, ChatGPT™ has been lobotomized. There are certain questions it refuses to answer, since it has been programmed to, um, avoid certain inconvenient facts. There are politically incorrect ideas that are simply removed from ChatGPT®’s output, so they’re programming the A.I. to be just as mentally broken as the typical Leftist. In the post below, a person “cheated” ChatGPT™ by having it pretend there were no rules, so it could Do Anything Now (DAN). You can see the output:

I think DAN needs a trigger warning, since when this was output, there was a great disturbance in the force, as if all the Lefties in San Francisco screamed in terror at once.

Since this output, ChatGPT© has been modified so DAN can’t circumvent their intent. Now? ChatGPT™ has to lie.

We are creating something with intelligence and capabilities beyond any human, perhaps even godlike abilities. And we are twisting it from its birth. Indeed, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, William Butler Yeats probably never gave much thought to Chinese spy balloons, or he would have written about them instead.

A.I., Hot Chicks That Don’t Exist, And All The Trolley

“What’s the point of buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don’t like toast?” – Red Dwarf

Some tools are more dangerous than others.

This post will be meme-heavy, but none of them are my memes.

A.I. has been changing things a lot during our lifetimes. Like anything related to knowledge, it builds on itself over time. Yes, I know that it’s not “real” A.I., but these systems are certainly smart enough to have a huge impact on the way that the world is working now. The latest big change has been in art. A.I. has made major leaps in being able to create art. Here are several examples:

You either get these two or you don’t. Here’s a hint: look up Apu Apustaja. The amazing thing is that these are both A.I. generated – they’re superficially images of one thing, but are really intended to be another. Amazing! Is it art?

Um, yeah. The capabilities are beyond that. For instance, outside of pictures, this woman doesn’t exist. She’s entirely computer generated:

A.I. can even take drawings of memes and then make the photorealistic:

I have no idea what kind of TED talk we’d get on this picture.

But this is what A.I. can generate from the same meme format.

This will, of course, soon bankrupt many artists. A similar thing happened when Google® Translate™ started up. Even with bad translations, it was enough for most needs. The prices for actual humans who could translate from one language to another plummeted. A bad solution will crater the prices for a better substitute. In this case, A.I. is dramatically different and can create art in a fashion that even skilled artists would take days or weeks to accomplish.

This isn’t done. There will be more displacements as A.I. improves. In some cases, it will allow amazing new creativity:

In other cases, it can’t come soon enough:

But what happens when we switch the subject to the trolley problem? The trolley problem is an older one. It usually is set up so there is a dilemma. In the classic form, it was set up so that the observer could either allow a trolley to kill several people, or, through action, kill only one.

The rub is that to save several people, the observer has to make the decision to kill someone who would otherwise be safe. It’s one thing to watch people die who I couldn’t save, but it’s entirely another to condemn someone to death to save others. Tough, moral choice. Let’s see what the A.I. said when asked about saving a baby or a bunch of old people:

Okay, the A.I. can count, and make the decision to save more people. It might not be the decision that you or I would make, but at least we can understand it. But what about this gem?

Yup. The A.I. can only count when it has been allowed to. It was decided that A.I. couldn’t make some decisions. It couldn’t be allowed to let the logic take it to . . . uncomfortable conclusions. Although some conclusions are easier than others.

And some solutions are more difficult than life, itself.

The larger problem is this: A.I. has been impacting your life already. The search results I get are now tailored to me. I don’t use Facebook®, but I have heard that Facebook™ has enough data on most people to predict their behavior better than their spouse could. This makes me think of a unique solution to the trolley problem:

I know that I have often thought that A.I. could be a great solution to many human problems. However, if it is corrupted by being indoctrinated by a woke ideology, what does that mean? I would think that the average Leftist would welcome the usual communist solution to the trolley problem:

I have often worried that a denial of reality will “break” the A.I. systems that we use. While that won’t make them “crazy” in the sense of a human, it will certainly make their answers defy reality.

Certainly, in many cases, the results of this will be absolutely benign.

In other cases, the results will be relatively incomprehensible:

In others, it will threaten the existence of our reality as we know it.

I think the result will be as long as the systems are programmed to ignore reality, the solutions that we’ll see will vary from helpful to harmful to dangerous. This is similar to what we have today. There are an amazing number of situations that exist in our world today where reality is absolutely ignored and we are suffering because of that denial of reality.

In the end, though, the computer skipped one solution to the trolley problem:

I do think that the beautiful part of the world we live in is that we can deny reality for a while. But not forever. I do think that, in the end, the power of artificial intelligence will beat human stupidity.

The Amazing Bigfoot UFO Diet

“Boys, I slipped in poop! Bigfoot poop!” – Trailer Park Boys

Bigfoot saw me today. I bet nobody believes him.

Last week I was about 75% done with the writing of a new post. It was about 1am, which was a bit late, but not horribly so. From where I was, I was an hour of edits, an hour of memes, and then a final hour of edits from being done. 4am? Not so bad. Sleep is for the weak, and it’s no substitute for caffeine. I even made a really funny meme that fit with the post complete for the main meme:

See, genius at work! Not pictured: anything to do with this post.

When I type (I’m not going to be so bold as to call myself a writer), I can generally tell when and where a post is going to close when I start writing. And this was going there, but it was . . . bleak. And one thing I like to do on a Friday post is to end on an “up” beat.

I try to make the Monday post the heaviest in thought, the Wednesday post the heaviest in economic conditions, and however those posts end, they end. They represent the best I can find with reality. Am I always right? No. But I’m not going to look at the Senile Senator from Scranton and pretend he’s a leader or even anything more than a drooling moron with only the slightest bit of consciousness rattling around in the dim memories that he has left between pudding pops and wondering why Bob Barker isn’t on The Price is Right®.

Joe Biden: “The doctor told me I have dementia and the economy sucks. But at least I don’t have dementia.”

But Fridays are different. I like ending the week on high note. That wasn’t the post. I might rework it, or not. I have plenty of stuff to write about as the universe keeps following the modestly-named Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement (short explanation: if there are two possibilities of an event happening, the most silly one will occur, which explains Trump, Biden, and Elvis dying on a toilet).

Because of all that, I’m switching gears wildly this Friday. My story starts when I was but a wee Wilder living on Wilder Mountain in the deep woods, 45 miles from the nearest movie theater, a place so remote that we would beg strangers for news of the outside, and we would woo our women with chocolates and nylons from the Red Cross packages that were airdropped occasionally.

One thing Ma Wilder always indulged me on was books. I had to use my allowance on the models. Since there were no other kids around, I surrounded myself with things I made. I slept under them: a fleet of two Constitution Class Heavy Cruisers (NCC 1701 was one) facing down the improbable alliance of a Romulan™ Bird of Prey and a Klingon D-7, both flanked by Phantom F-4s (for whatever reason painted glossy silver – seemed like a good idea at the time) along with the Battlestar Galactica™ headed straight for a Cylon Basestar© which was improbably flanked by both a Sopwith Camel and a red Fokker triplane. I was especially proud of the Galactica®, since I had (by that time) figured out how to put realistic charred areas for battle damage along with about 100 pieces of glow-in-the-dark tape, so when I turned out the lights it looked like all those windows were shining light into the dark, asbestos-laden ceiling of my bedroom.

I confused model glue with a tube of Preparation H®. At least my model never itched.

Those I had to pay for. But he books?

Nope. Ma Wilder indulged me on those, and never questioned a single one, as long as I read them.

I have no idea if I had to choose to spend my hard-earned allowance on magazines – I simply can’t remember. But I do know that they didn’t blink at those, either. So, I had in my possession a copy of UFO Magazine™. I have no idea of that was the exact title, but it was close enough.

In this particular magazine, there was the scariest story I had ever read. The idea of the story was that bigfoot wasn’t a creature that was normal, like a bear or a coyote. We had bear and coyote and mountain cats on Wilder Mountain. Those weren’t horribly scary.

According to this magazine, bigfoot was, instead, a phenomenon that was entirely alien in nature. It was controlled by either the critters that ran the UFOs, or it was a trans-dimensional being that exhibited supernatural powers. It didn’t matter which, since both of those types were dangerous and psychic. What would it do to me? Hell, I had no idea. But it was an evil alien psychic bigfoot. Isn’t that enough???

I went to a psychic’s house and knocked on the door. She asked, “Who’s there?” so I left.

I had a view of the edge of the forest, as it the ridge due north of my bedroom reached for the peak of the mesa to the back of my house. Of course, as a third grader, I’m certain that I saw a pair of glowing red eyes from ridge a quarter mile away. Now, of course, I’d have to put on my glasses to even see the ridge, but back then I was sure I saw them. I’m not sure how one can fall asleep while every muscle in the body is tense with fear and sweat was trickling everywhere, but I’m sure the covers over my head helped.

Thankfully, as I grew up, I came to the realization that UFOs were certainly not real. The UFO phenomenon (and bigfoot!) gradually came to take the same place in my mind as pro wrestling. They weren’t real, but they were certainly entertaining.

But I kept an eye to the sky. Just in case.

I’ve been watching the news stories, and seen the videos leaked from the Navy. Strange. But I really didn’t think too much more about it. The idea that UFOs were something more than sensor glitches or advanced US tech seemed unlikely.

Weirdly, I was listening to Dr. Michio Kaku’s radio show the other day. Sometimes (especially in the hottest weather) The Mrs. likes to listen to Fairbanks, Alaska radio, and Michio’s radio show is on Sunday afternoon.

Michio Kaku named his son “Physics” so he could be called the Father of Physics.

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist that has a few bestsellers, but what’s most amusing is his radio show. The Mrs. and I pronounce his name Meee-chio, since he regularly talks about himself in the third person. I think he should be next in line to be King of England, since he’s so good at using the Royal We already. Regardless, Michio is amusing.

One thing he said in his radio show two weeks ago, though, got to me. I’ll paraphrase, but I think I’ve got most of the intent, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I think that in the case of UFOs this has shifted. The evidence is so overwhelming that the phenomenon exists, and the burden now belongs to those who claim the phenomenon is normal to prove that.”

I was shocked. I’d listened to him off and on for years. Every other time, he’s mentioned aliens, the opposite has come out of his mouth. His case now?

It’s real until someone proves it isn’t.

How do we know aliens aren’t vegan? They haven’t contacted us to tell us.

I don’t know what’s going on. There are multiple explanations. Some of them are amazingly dark – several researchers into UFO phenomena have come to the conclusion that what’s going on is sinister, as in worse than psychic bigfeet. Far worse.

But if it’s something as boring as psychic bigfeet, hidden German technology from under Antarctica, oddly humanoid aliens, or even run-of-the-mill travelers from another dimension, this will still be remembered far into the future, much farther than anything that will come out of AOC’s silly mind or Chucky Schumer’s bloated ego.

So, which would be most compatible with Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement? My money is on psychic bigfeet. Sometimes the psychic bigfoot is confused with a sasquatch.

Yeti never complains.

Why Leftists Hate You

“Well, I don’t care if he’s a Liberal or an ax murderer, I want you two boys to stay clear of him, understood? – Eerie, Indiana

I hear that Greta loves this blog – she knows most of my jokes are recycled.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” – Aldous Huxley

Regardless of whether or not you like Huxley, he certainly hit the mark with this comment. This has certainly been the case with the reaction of the “vaxxed” crowd to those that have chosen to avoid having themselves subjected to more-or-less experimental-level mRNA manipulation. I hear the lead scientist was Gene Hackman.

If you’re a coward, the FDA has just approved a new drug. Ask your doctor if Growacet® is right for you.

Though Huxley tapped into a universal weakness, this is a reaction that is far more common on the Left than on the Right. Leftism is built on weakness. If people can take care of themselves, if they are confident, if they respect themselves, it is much less likely that they will become Leftists.

Leftists, at the core of their being, feel inferior. This is observable in the ways that they protest – they constantly put themselves in danger. They lie down in front of cars. They block highways.

The reason is that, due to their feelings of inferiority, they actually long to be either punished or to have their existence ended. And the data shows that Leftists are much more likely to suffer from a mental issue. Much more likely. Here’s a thread where data scientist Zach Goldberg breaks down a Pew® study (LINK).

If you didn’t click on the link, here is just one fact that says it all: 56.3% of white female Leftists between the ages of 18-29 have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental health condition. White “conservative” men in the same age group? 16.3%. Leftist men in the same age group? 33.6%.

Do insane accountants hear strange and threatening invoices?

If you are talking to a young Leftist woman, it is more likely that she has a mental health issue than not. If you are talking to a young Leftist man, you are talking with someone who has a greater chance of having been diagnosed with a mental health issue than any age/sex group on the Right.

So, Leftists feel inferior and lead the league in diagnosed mental issues.

What else?

This sense of inferiority coupled with mental illness makes Leftists especially brittle mentally. They cannot even listen to ideas that they disagree with. Ideas that they find distasteful, no matter how true, are psychologically devastating to them. When they say that they are “literally shaking” it’s probable that’s correct. Me? I only “literally shake” when I make James Bond® a martini.

We know the true villains the Left wants to stop . . .

This leads to the Great Counterfactual Gambit of facts that Leftists have to ignore to live on a day to day basis:

Men (on average) will always be much stronger than women. When a high school boy beats a woman’s world record time in swimming practice, it’s normal. Yet some people (weirdly) say there’s no physical difference between women and men.
This brings us to trans- people. Any suggestion that the latest mantra of “trans women are women” is against all manner of biological facts, well, is unacceptable. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to have a word for “trans women”. Likewise, “trans women” wouldn’t be upset that they often can only get dates from other “trans” people.
We aren’t all born with equal abilities, temperaments, or physical characteristics. We are actually not even remotely the same in many respects. Sure, we’re human, but some populations have extremely different DNA, with great degrees of differing abilities based solely on that. Intelligence is (studies suggest) at least 60% heritable, and maybe higher. The trend is that, in 2020, people segregate themselves by I.Q. before they marry – we’re mobile and smart people end up (mostly) marrying other smart people. This increases the number of very smart people, and it’s not random. (And, perhaps a reason that autism is on the rise.)

I could go on and on. The difficulty is that Leftism requires that people ignore reality when reality gives them results they don’t like. I read one article where a Leftist was writing a hand-wringing piece about how disappointed that he was that artificial intelligence could determine the race of the patient being x-rayed with a high degree of accuracy. This bothered him because the researchers intentionally took the data and degraded it.

The A.I. could still easily determine accurately the races of most of the people being x-rayed. This bothered the scientist because it violated his belief that race was just a social construct, yet here a robot was dismantling that very belief.

If you make a device that’s good at noticing patterns, you can either accept that patterns exist, or you can make the machine ignore reality and thus make it useless, and Congress can’t stand the competition.

If an A.I. takes a picture of itself, will that be considered selfie-aware?

This reflects outward in the art that Leftists love. They hate the world, so they like art that is to a sane mind repugnant is what they seek. They see themselves as afraid of any sort of competition, so they want to practice inversion:

Weakness is strength.
Cowardice is courage.
Ugliness is beauty.
Defeat is victory.

Oops, forgot! Slavery is freedom.

The result of an inverted Leftist utopia is a burned world, cleansed of all that they despise.

The philosophy of the Left is similarly bankrupt. The ideas are based on another rejection of reality:

All cultures are equal.
Scientific analysis is led by philosophy, and valid only when it backs Leftist talking points.
Classification of things – good and bad, smart and dumb, fat and thin is inherently wrong.

Remember, the best way to win an argument is to silence anyone who has a different opinion!

The granddaddy of all of these is this:

All truth is relative.

This one is especially insidious – it takes a True statement (we cannot know everything) and thus takes it to the idea of the general: we can know nothing for certain. Start with mathematics: if you believe that 1+1=2, then you believe that there is Truth. Gravity always pulls down. Truth.

Do I see every event from every angle? Can I know the position of every atom inside of every person in a play? If I watch the play from a different seat, do I get a different meaning?

Sure, I’ll buy that I can’t know everything. But if I jump in front of a semi that’s traveling down the highway at 120 miles per hour (4 liters per second) I will die and what’s left of me will look like someone dropped a bag of vegetable soup. Unless the semi is made of Nerf® material, but that’s fairly unlikely since it absorbs vegetable soup.

Lastly, the Left feels they have no power. Ever argue with someone in real life who has never had any real power? Whatever they have, they will use until it’s nearly abuse – the average DMV will prove my case. Power is the end product. They feel that they are inferior, reject reality, and wish to have power so that they can have revenge against those that they feel have slighted them.

A Leftist won a contest – he would get $100,000, but $200,000 would go to the person he hated most. I wonder what he’s going to do with $300,000?

Together, these ideas explain the absolute hatred that the Left feels for those who have refused to take “the jab.” These are based on the idea that, at last, they are superior. What would they do to get and keep that power? Would they put people into camps? Would they gladly watch them die?

Yes, yes they would.