Hi Piers

HI –

I am still slowly learning how to use my Smartphone; with luck I will manage to complete the process before the next upgrade puts me back at ground zero minus two and a half. I can turn on the flashlight function, sometimes by accident. I know how to take a picture with it, though I have never actually done so. I can receive and answer emails, though rarely, because the addresses are in my computer back in Florida and I forgot to bring the backup flash drive for that. I can play games on it. I have discovered how to click for the latest CNN news, but soon I find myself amidst urgent diversions and ads. Something like this: Mobs threaten to burn down the Capitol if Trump is not installed as President-For-Life by next Tuesday. Florida’s Governor DeSantis, once a leading prospect, is now fading. Heat waves are flourishing. Mazie could not believe what she saw in her rose garden. Picture of a woman looking appalled. Click on it and it continues. So Mazie runs to fetch her neighbor Rhonda, who knows all about roses. But Rhonda has never seen anything like it either. So she takes a picture of it for the local Horticultural Society to identify. The moment she does, there comes the sound of police sirens converging on the house. So they — THE TWELVE SIGNALS THAT YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY BLOODSUCKING ALIEN PEDOPHILES. 1. They look and act exactly like ordinary folk. 2. They belong to the wrong political party. 3. They are quietly closing in on you. 4. Don’t be fooled by their seemingly innocuous manner; they are experienced deceivers. 5. In fact they may be among some of your best friends. — SPONSORED BY BLASTAWAY GUNWORKS. BUY A QUALITY SUBMACHINEGUN WITH LIMITLESS AMMUNITION ON CREDIT, NO QUESTIONS ASKED. I haven’t touched a gun since I got out of the US Army in 1959, where I was a good shot, but know they are dangerous and should be better regulated. So I use the backoff button and manage to resume Mazie and Rhonda, who are getting arrested on charges unspecified. Grim faced police will not tell them a thing as they are handcuffed and bundled into an unmarked dark-windowed van while men in protective hazard suits carefully dig out the rose garden. At this point I recognize this narrative as a work of fiction, classic clickbait I fell for, and back off again, but now the screen locks onto an ad for purple Crunchmaster Martian dogfood on sale at only 50% above the normal price, and will not let go. I have to turn off the phone to clear it. So I’m not quite there yet, phonewise, but am making progress. So long as I don’t get arrested for not buying that gun or dogfood, or reporting that strange rose in my neighbor’s garden. I am being careful about the alien pedophiles, not letting them know that I have caught on to them as I explore ways to report them to the authorities without attracting their malign attention. Fortunately I now live among older folk, not much young blood to suck, not many children here. There are pet dogs, though; I wonder if the alien taste — no, surely not. I also play a lot of cards and tiles on my smartphone, and gaze at the pretty girls peppering their ads. I am making notes for Xanth #50, working title Limbo. It’s a life.

 

As is known, per my legendary inefficiency, I have not yet gotten my subscription addresses updated, so receive magazines when eventually forwarded in packages. Eventually I’ll get updates done and be prompter. Herewith my commentary triggered by ten back issues of THE WEEK. I will bypass current news in favor of stray items that interest me. Feel free to skip this section if old news is not your thing. But do be cautious about those aliens who only look like your neighbors; it may not be your friendship they hunger for.

 

THE WEEK May 12, 2023. Commenting on a mass murder in Texas, “Republicans have long relied on a toxic combination of ‘racism and fear’ to motivate their base.” I am politically neutral, a registered independent, but I think I would not want to know folk who are motivated by racism and fear. Article titled “Supreme Court: Is it time for a real ethics code?” I believe it is, as too many justices today seem to vote in support of private interests that slip them a lot of money under the table, damaging our once proud democracy. I have remarked before how the words “principled conservative” seem to have become an oxymoron. America should be better than this. A Vermont elementary school has removed the words “male” and “female” from its fifth grade reproductive class. Now it is “person who produces sperm” and “person who produces eggs.” I think whoever set that up is a “person who has an IQ of 53½,” and I’m relieved that I no longer live in Vermont, lovely as its scenery is. I grew up there, but left in 1957 when I got drafted into the US Army. Beatriz Flamini, age 50, spent 500 days alone in a crave, as part of a study about how her mind and body would deal with extreme deprivation and solitude. She passed time by writing, drawing, knitting, exercising, and reading 60 books. When the 500^th day came she wasn’t happy to leave the cave. Maybe that says something about the current state of the world. Mifepristone, the abortion pill, is getting delivered by a modern underground railroad. Over half of women use it to terminate pregnancies, now that physical abortions have been outlawed in many states. It is reported to be safer than giving birth. It is thought that people may come to use a single AI adviser for all their news. That makes me nervous. The folk of the United Kingdom are coming to realize that Brexit has left them worse off. Yes, I’m glad I don’t live in England any more; I left there in 1938 as a child of four. Protesting climate activists in Germany glued their hands to the asphalt, setting up roadblocks. I support their cause, but I’d be nervous doing that; what happens when I have scratch my nose, or pee? States that passed Stand Your Ground laws have had a 55 percent higher gun homicide rate the past two years than states that did not adopt them. New York and California lost more that $90 billion in income during the Covid pandemic as taxpayers moved to other states. I presume that those other states were cheaper to live in. Retailers are abandoning downtown locations because of rising costs and surging crime. Harry Belafonte died, age 96; I remember his music from my youth. It turns out that he suffered undiagnosed dyslexia. So did I, I believe; in our day dyslexics were merely considered stupid. Remember, it took me three years and five schools to make it through first grade, because of my difficulty learning to read. I made sure that my dyslexic daughter Penny was not screwed similarly by the school system.

 

THE WEEK May 19, 2023. Editor’s letter by William Falk remarks on mass shootings, the horrific photos routinely suppressed because of sensibilities of readers, asks “If Americans were repeatedly exposed to images of children with their faces blown off, would they still accept that ‘nothing can be done?’” Good question. It’s an accepted psychiatric dictum that you can’t fix a problem unless you first recognize that it is a problem. When will we recognize how bad the problem of gun violence in America is? Article says that under international law, the US has a legal responsibility to give asylum seekers a fair hearing and humane treatment. But what about the numbers? Current policy allows 30,000 people a month to legally enter the US. That’s about a thousand a day, every day. I’m an immigrant, and I feel for immigrants, but where can they all be sustainably settled? Another problem: a California task force recommends that Black residents be paid a total of as much as $800 billion for past injustices. That may be fair, but what about Native Americans who were genocidally exterminated, leaving few survivors? How much should those survivors be paid? There are monstrous injustices to settle, if settlement is even possible. The state of Florida is banning textbooks that tell the truth about race and politics. Is that really the answer we want? U.S. News & World Report has annual rankings of colleges. Now there is suspicion that the rankings are distorted, sometimes by lies the colleges tell, and most of the people with high LSAT scores are white and Asian. That puts Black and Latino applicants at a disadvantage. It seems to me that a school should try to educate well, rather than select students with the most advantages to begin with. The ones at the bottom of the totem pole are the ones most in need. I speak as one who had serious trouble in the school system, and chose a college that had no grades, where I flourished. My career speaks for itself. How many folk are just as talented and diligent as I am, but who got squelched by the system? I’d like to see them have their fair chance. 2023 seems to be going for the highest number of mass killing deaths ever. Should we root for the record? There are 400 million guns in America; that should encourage it. Meanwhile loneliness is a mass epidemic, correlating with depression, anxiety, heart disease, strokes, and dementia. MaryLee and I are largely isolated by our move and the continuing pandemic that folk like to pretend doesn’t exist, and we feel it. Fortunately we have each other. But contemporary society is suffering rising rates of suicide, drug abuse, and political vitriol. If I discover an answer, I’ll embrace it. About 20 percent of US workers are in occupations vulnerable to AI automation, including accountants, writers, interpreters, and mathematicians. But this listing omits one: CEOs. Start replacing them with AI and see where it leads. But if AI were used to automate the boring and repetitive tasks, workers might embrace it. I understand that horsemen and carriage makers protested when the automobile appeared; am I, as a writer, to protest being replaced by a machine? Maybe this: let anyone whose job is eliminated by AI be granted early retirement at full pay. See who protests that. Google has introduced a foldable phone, Felix the Pixel Fold, at $1,700. Insects try to keep their backs to the sun during the day, which helps them stay level as they fly. That’s why they orbit night lights, which mess them up by being too close. And the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike. “The studios’ goal is to maximize profits” and they are succeeding at the expense of the writers. I say again, why not let any replaced writer retire at full pay? Maybe some will become novelists and compete with me, until AI replaces us both. I am betting that if AI writes a Xanth novel, and I write a Xanth novel, it will not take readers long to figure out which is which. If they prefer the AI one, so be it. I know, I know; chess masters and Go masters thought AI could never rival them. They were wrong. Maybe I am too. But when it comes to original imagination, try me, AI. See if you can write a better Xanth #50 than I can. Yes, the critics may prefer AI, imagination not being their forte, but what about the readers? I’m game if you are. And an ad: how in 2021 Maddy Park, an Asian woman in America (I think), concerned about violence against the Asian community so that even taking public transportation could be unsafe, started a fund for cab rides for those in the Asian community who needed them most, including women, the elderly, and LGBTQ+. In two days it raised over a hundred thousand dollars. I’m not Asian, but as a nationalized American immigrant from England I have a notion how it feels to be regarded as a foreigner, and I sympathize with her effort. You can get in touch via LoveHasNoLabels.com, or maybe reach her at @CafeMaddyCab. She’s a pretty woman, if that helps. Tyson Foods, which produces about one fifth of chicken, beef and pork sold in the US, posted a loss of $97 million in the first three months of 2023, compared with a net income of $829 million a year earlier. Maybe as a vegetarian I am overeager to see the killing of animals stop, but does this represent a vegetarian trend? Would that it were. I did not know of the rabbi Harold Kushner, though he was of my generation, and I am not religious, but I appreciate his sentiment: “If I, walking through the wards of a hospital, have to face the fact that either God is all-powerful but not kind or thoroughly kind but not totally powerful, I would rather compromise God’s power and affirm his love.” As I see it, the problem is that believers believe in a fantasy that does not make ultimate sense. And the issue’s The last word article reprinted from THE WASHINGTON POST is headed “The sheriff vs. the ‘scumbags’. In Florida, a pugnacious lawman finds himself face-to-face with a band of neo-Nazis riding the rising tide of hate.” Where does free speech end and criminal intimidation begin? I think we don’t have an answer yet.

 

THE WEEK May 26, 2023. Cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC are facing strains on resources and services because of the influx of migrants bused there by Republican governors. I understand that the migrants are lied to, so they expect to be welcomed. There is a global exodus of desperate dispossessed people trying to escape instability, war, gang violence, and economic ruin, coming to our border in the hope of better lives. I novelized this kind of thing in my Space Tyrant series in the 1980s, where global politics was translated to Solar System politics, making the Haitian boat people into space bubble folk. President Reagan, with appalling cruelty, had boat folk towed back out to sea; the Jupiter authority had them towed back out to space. Not much seems to have changed in forty years. Interview with Donald Trump: and the report is that the “madness” is back, and the 2024 election season is going to be an even “stranger and scarier” ride than 2020 and 2016. “The former president made it clear that he’s as shameless, unhinged, and deceitful as ever. The 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen,’ Trump still insisted.” He will pardon most of the Capitol rioters. He views himself as both a victim and the only man who can “save” America. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins interviewed him; a cartoon later in the magazine shows him jetting fire from his mouth that is burning her face off. Why? For challenging his lies. These are interesting times. A Florida teacher is under investigation for showing students an animated Disney movie, because it includes a gay character. I call this bigotry galore, and am glad to be gone from that state. The most popular name for girls born in 2022 was Olivia, followed by Emma and Charlotte; for boys it was Liam, Noah, and Oliver. Threats against members of congress have doubled in the past five years. An American doing charity work in China, who ran a friendship group, was sentenced to life in prison on espionage charges. I am not familiar with the case, but I think I don’t want to get near China or its justice system. Last year Americans placed $93.7 billion in game bets. I’m glad I’m not a gambler. Well, being a writer instead of a bank teller or ditch digger is a gamble, but you know what I mean. What happens when artificial intelligence, AI, becomes smarter than its creators? We may be about to find out. “The arrival of general-purpose, super-intelligent AI is in many ways analogous to the arrival of a superior alien civilization.” This makes me nervous. We face serious global problems, like overpopulation; we may not like the way AI deals with it. Brian Klaas in his Substack newsletter remarks that we now have access to more knowledge than ever before, but deliberate ignorance thrives. Misinformed voters are often wrong but never uncertain. A 4.5 billion year old meteorite landed in a New Jersey home. Maybe it was tired of traveling and wanted to rest a while. Religiosity is growing in Florida and Texas, likely locking them in as red states, but overall it is declining; this is called the “God Gap.” In the United Kingdom the Conservatives’ explicit aim is to dismantle “the right of protest.” In America too, I think, and elsewhere. Dictatorships don’t like protest. The pandemic has killed over 1.1 million Americans and is still evolving. It has cost the US economy $14 trillion. For the past year the overwhelming majority of deaths have occurred among people over 75. I, being 89, am nervous. Yes, I use a mask, but few others do. The past two years states with Republican controlled legislatures had a fifty percent higher rate of gun deaths than those run by Democrats. Yes, we moved from one to the other; is that enough? The number of folk displaced by conflict or natural disasters reached a record high of 71.1 mission in 2022. the amount of wealth held by US families more than tripled from $38 trillion in 1989 to $140 trillion last year. Millennials anf Gen X heirs will have much to inherit. 91% of liberals favor accepting change, while only 28% of conservatives do. Streaming has turned out to be more costly than anyone expected, so the new strategy is charging more for less. I really don’t know anything about streaming, being from another century, but I suspect this means it will decline, and they won’t understand why. Caryn Marjorie, 23 years old with 1.8 million followers, has more than a thousand “boyfriends” dating a virtual version of herself developed by an AI company, paying a dollar a minute for her company. She says romantic chatbots have the potential to cure loneliness. Old fashioned as I am, I’d rather have a physical girlfriend even if she is a lady robot. In my science fiction I defend the rights of ladybots. Not that I’m ready to replace my living one. Anorexia is an eating disorder mostly affecting teen girls who develop a pathological fear of getting fat and starve themselves, never getting thin enough to be satisfied. Review of the book Good Girls: A Story and Study of AnorexiaI by Hadley Freeman gives her own history. She says it’s not about trying to appear thin but trying to appear ill, relating to fears about impending adulthood. Starving herself was a way of shrinking and simplifying her world. Interesting; I loved food as a teen, and always preferred thin girls, but not that thin. I have noted that the older a woman is, the heavier she is; only divorcees looking for a new man differ. Clearly they don’t suffer anorexia, but I wonder whether a tinge of it would improve their romantic lives. The final article is a reprint from The New York Times Magazine, “Deep in a labyrinth, I found myself,” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. I always liked puzzles, including labyrinths. I remember my surprised pleasure when I took an IQ test and discovered it was mostly puzzles. At that point I started focusing, and my subnormal scores started rising. I think the test makers tend to fool themselves that they really understand intelligence; I speak as one who got downgraded for giving correct answers when the test makers had incorrect ones. But that’s a rant for another day. Labyrinths have been popular throughout history and prehistory. Ingrid suffered an accident and brain injury in 2007 that gave her temporary amnesia and left her lost, never quite sure where she was. She couldn’t fin her way anywhere, even close to home. After 16 years of that she got the notion of getting lost on purpose. So she started visiting famous mazes, such as the hedge maze outside the castle of Chenonceau in France. And the one under Paris, the catacombs. It was fun being where everyone was lost. Now if only that were true for those lost in the labyrinth of life.

 

THE WEEK June 2, 2023. The cover picture shows Florida governor DeSantis wooking the reluctant GOP elephant with a bouquet of flowers. Can he win the hearts of voters who still love Trump? Doubtful, but not yet decided. A Florida man went out to pee, fell in a pond, and got his arm bitten off by an alligator. That strikes me as a bit much of a penalty. Jeff Bezos, the world’s third richest man, put a likeness of his girlfriend’s face on his $500 million mega yacht and gave her a 30 carat engagement ring. It seems it pays to impress a wealthy man. But the far right Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who once advised women that all marital difficulties can be solved by “the power you have in Christ” is divorcing the father of her four children. As I recall, Jesus never married, at least not openly, and Mary Magdalene was silent on the matter. There are now about five times as many sheep in New Zealand as human folk, a reduction from the former 22 to 1 ratio. Maybe the sheep are getting tired of being fleeced. In Gulfport, Mississippi a 17 year old transgender girl had to skip her high school graduation ceremony because she would not dress as a boy. Her folks sued, but the judge ruled that attendance is voluntary and not a constitutional right. If I ruled the world, she’s have been allowed to attend in a dress. It turns out that there were four times as many child sex abusers in the Catholic Church in Illinois as were disclosed. I presume that is also true elsewhere. The NAACP has warned LGBTQ and nonwhite people to “beware that your life is not valued” in Florida. Again, also elsewhere? A Missouri teenager rented a U-Haul truck and crashed it into a metal barrier a few hundred feet from the White House as part of a plan to seize power and be put in charge of the nation. He flaunted a Nazi flag with a swastika, expressing his admiration far the Nazis “great history.” I am not familiar with actress Mara Wilson, but learn that she was a child star who felt completely unmoored when her demanding but protective mother died. At age 12 she googled herself and found things she couldn’t unsee, such as porn sites with her head superimposed on other girls’ bodies. It’s a shame. A page on censoring ideas and rewriting history. Is censorship growing? Yes. A record 2.571 different titles were banned or censored by school districts, states, and government entities in 2022, most of them by or about racial minorities or LGBTQ people. It isn’t just individual books, its ideas, themes, identities, it’s knowledge of the history of our country. In some places the mere presence of LGBTQ people in a book can cause it to be labeled obscene. Wholesale bans on references to sex, race, and gender, regardless of context. Some art history books get junked. Textbooks that portray US history in anything but a positive light, regardless of the truth. Do parents support this? 77% are very worried, and 80% in both major parties say books should never be banned for discussing race, slavery, or critical views of US history. But the lunatic fringe has sunk its teeth into the regulatory systems and won’t let go until it is dragged off by the forked tail and hurled into the chasm of powerlessness. The smoke from wildfires is affecting the health of folk living east of them, that is, downwind, raising the risk of cancer, brain tumors, respiratory and cardiac disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, mental performance, and miscarriage. It’s getting worse. Republicans have a big long-term problem: young voters remain “durably hostile” to the party. Folk used to worry about getting lost; now, with smartphones, that concern is gone. With police forces diminished by years of spending cuts, rent-a-cops are increasingly evident. They can’t make arrests, but they can intimidate. Italy: epic floods are the new normal. Was Trump’s collusion with Russia a hoax? Gathering evidence indicates no. US drug deaths hit a new high last year. The weight of New York City’s buildings are making the city’s underlying ground sink .08 inch a year. The surrounding waters have risen about 9 inches since 1950. I’m glad I don’t live there. More than a thousand incidents involving firearms occurred in US schools since 2018. A new political group called No Labels plans to run a third party candidate in next year’s presidential election if the parties don’t nominate better candidates. But this group is pro-billionaire. Democrats fear it could siphon votes away from Biden and put Trump in office be default. From the Wit & Wisdom feature: “Why should I care about posterity? What has it ever done for me?” Groucho Marx. “Fiction is where I go to tell the truth.” Pat Conroy. AI: is it conscious? So far, the answer is No. there may be a new skin patch for peanut allergy. The planet Saturn has 145 moons. I wonder when billionaires will start buying moons for private mansions? US consumers now owe $986 billion on their charge cards, a record high. Jay-Z and Beyonce paid $200 million for a 40,000 square foot mansion in Malibu, CA. It was a bargain, originally listed for $295 million. I wonder if they put on their charge card? The median existing-home price in April was $388,800, a big drop in a decade. Stores are closing city locations because crime rings are costing them too much in thefts. New abortion bans are putting women with troubled pregnancies at the risk of their lives. As I think I have said before, I suspect that such bans are an attempt to punish women for the sin of having sex. Otherwise universal free contraception would be promoted.

 

THE WEEK June 9, 2023. Editor’s letter by Mark Gimein says that it has been a long theory that we haven’t met advanced aliens because they have been destroyed by the AIs they created. President Biden seems to have done well, settling the debt crisis deal; Rep. Marjorie Taylor called it a “shit sandwich.” The thought of having one of those for lunch turns me off, but it’s effective imagery. “Controversy of the week” “Trump: Could democracy survive a second term?” Good question. The cost of the average US wedding has ballooned to $29,000. Wow! I think it cost about $100 for me to marry MaryLee on our drive beside a Sabel Palmetto tree in 2020 as the pandemic closed in. It wasn’t a really fancy occasion. What counted for us was the compatible union. As I put it, my first marriage lasted 63 years; I don’t think my second one will last as long, but we’re giving it a try. 70 percent of the folk of Nigeria are younger than 30, and youth unemployment is over 50 percent. I wonder what is taking out the old folk? In Uganda homosexuality mandates life imprisonment, with the death penalty for “aggravated” cases. I am unabashedly heterosexual, and love the look and feel of women, but I know that homosexuality is a normal part of the human spectrum, and criminalizing it is ludicrous. Will they be getting around to criminalizing left handedness, blue eyes, or free speech? In China, six months after they had to lift their zero Covid policy, it is roaring back, approaching 40 million cases per week. It is driven by the Omicron subvariant XBB, which is also present in the United States. MaryLee and I would like to get out and about more, socialize more, but this makes us nervous. We use masks in public, but few others do. How is Trump’s wall working? Border crossings more than doubled during his tenure. It has interfered with animal migrations. In a year it was breached more than 4,000 times. The West has an unkind interest in the Ukraine war: the more Russia bleeds there, the less capacity it has to make trouble in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or anywhere else. Soccer is bringing out the racism of Europe and the West, imitating chimpanzees the moment a black player touches the ball. Apparently the racists have no shame. In China, college graduates have a 20 percent jobless rate, and see little future. Republicans are pushing to allow 14 year olds to work mining, logging, and meatpacking jobs, to work until 9 PM on school nights, and to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants. Do they wonder why the youth vote is turning against them? Nearly 130,000 people in American prisons and jails are in solitary confinement on a given day, which increases self harm, psychological damage, and suicide. This is the land of the free? Martha Stewart posed for the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue at age 81. As an octogenarian myself, I say more power to her. Nineteen states are removing residents from Medicaid rolls, including millions of children, since the pandemic-era ban on cutting off coverage expired in March. Apparently they don’t much care about the welfare of their residents. The Supreme Court gutted the Clean Water Act, throwing out 50 years of precedent. After all, there’s money to be made from obliterating valuable ecosystems, and to hell with tomorrow. Cartoon: in 2023 Boss says to Writer “AI won’t simply replace you.” In 2030 they both are AI robots. This is something the bosses seem to be slow to catch on to: they are replaceable too. Social media may represent a formidable risk to teens because they are designed to be addictive. Up to 95% of them are hooked. But would restricting their access represent violation of their First Amendment protected speech right? Elon Musk has a brain implant company, Neuralink, that is developing a small device to link the brain to a computer to help patients with brain injuries and paralysis communicate. I wonder if it would help my paralyzed correspondent Jenny, maybe enabling her to talk? The civilization of the Maya Indians was far more advanced than thought. They have traced the remains of 417 cities connected by 110 miles of roads, dating back 3,000 years. So what happened to them? My understanding is that they chopped down the trees and brought on a prolonged drought that wiped them out. It is a course the contemporary world seems eager to follow. For example, a two day power blackout during a heat wave would cause about half the population of Phoenix, 790,000 people, to require hospital treatment, though there are only 3,000 emergency department beds. 13,000 people would die. And suppose the power failure was more than two days? Orcas, that is, killer whales, are starting to fight back, attacking boats in the Strait of Gibralter, deliberately ramming them, teaching their children how. Recycling plastic seems sensible, but 13 percent of it gets spewed into wastewater or air as microplastics now found across the planet as 5 mm particles, even in human bloodstreams, linked to several health issues. Maybe the city dump is after all a better choice. The book The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, by Stephen Vladeck — well, the title provides a notion. American democracy is under siege, and we need to pay attention and fight to get it back. Three quarters of women ages 25-54 now work, a record high. Solar investments are around a billion dollars a day, overtaking investments in oil production for the first time. Theater released films are gaining on pre-pandemic levels. Now if I could just get a Xanth movie … A company new to me, Nvidia, has joined the trillion dollar club, now with Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Its chips have become indispensable, especially with the advent of AI. Airships — that is, blimps — may be coming back to prominence, to provide environmentally friendly luxury transport. That interests me. If I ever get to travel again, that might be the way to go. The concluding article is “Prolonging the suffering” by Kristen McConnell, reprinted from The Atlantic. This explores futile care, an intervention that does not benefit the patient. About eleven percent of patients, one in nine, receive it, and another 8.6 percent receive treatment that is probably futile. For example, a man whose brain got a fungal infection; he will never recover, never even be conscious again, and probably would not want to live if he did wake. But he is kept alive regardless, pointlessly. Would I want to be in that situation? Hell no! Would you? Surely not. So make sure to have someone to represent you if you get caught that way, who can make them pull the plug.

 

THE WEEK June 16, 2023. “The GOP’s hard-right flank must stop threatening to ‘mount a circular firing squad to depose McCarthy.’” They are unsatisfied with the deal he made with Biden to defuse the debt crisis, and want him out. I wonder how many folk are still familiar with the reference to the circular firing squad, a facetious popular notion in my day. A regular firing squad lines up and fires at a blindfolded prisoner, executing him. A circular squad would stand around him, and their bullets would zing across to take out the squad members on the opposite sides. Crazy, right? That’s the point. McCarthy did the best he could, and condemning or firing him for it is pointless. AI –Artificial Intelligence — could it kill us all? Hundreds of researchers and tech leaders warn that AI could not only replace millions of human workers, it just might kill us all. I think of the computer’s effort to kill the crew in 2001; it actually made sense in cold logic. What’s the best way to save the world? Eliminate the folk who are destroying it. The Covid pandemic has taken 7 million lives, so far; that’s peanuts compared to what AI with power could do. Are we worried about the future? AI powered products are already surveilling us, collecting our data, preparing for what? To efficiently save the world? If we don’t reform soon, we may not like the way it happens. I am old, so probably won’t see the worst of it, but many of you who are reading this will. I feel for you. Apple says its iPhone will no longer correct a common swear word to “ducking.” That’s a ducking shame. There’s a whistleblower complaint that federal authorities have recovered numerous vehicles of non-human origin that have crashed on Earth, including dead aliens. I wish I could believe that, but I don’t. In Haiti civilians fed up with gang violence are striking back, with vigilantes stoning gang members, hacking off their limbs with machetes, and setting them on fire, sometimes alive. Gang violence has plummeted. Some worry there will be worse violence if the gangs strike back, but I suspect they’re not suicidal. Those vigilantes clearly mean business, and they are on the side of the police. Did Ukraine dynamite Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipelines? Maybe, or maybe some other power is letting them take the credit. CNN network is in trouble, with ratings hitting an eight year low. Why? It seems that many don’t trust CNN. I have another perspective: I want to check the news and weather on a daily basis, just to keep up, and don’t have a physical newspaper now that I live in town, so I try to use my smartphone. I go to CNN, get one or three headlines, then discover myself buried in solicitations and come-ons, no news in sight. I like the constant pictures of pretty faces, ample bosoms, and tight panties, but these do not tell me who is leading in the current election season, or from what galaxy the latest alien visitor hails from, or whether a hurricane will wipe out the local scene. If I could find a reliable, objective, relevant source of daily news I would take it, even if it were titled ALIEN SAUCER INFO. I remember when the internet came on the scene, and I tried to use it to locate something, but wound up buried in useless commercial solicitations. Then someone told me that Google was not like that, so I tried it, and lo! It put me right on the answer I needed. It actually made a search feasible. Google is now one of the trillionaire companies, so it seems that its revolutionary policy of giving the user what he wanted worked. I think now we could use a news outfit that actually provides the news without hassle. It could become very popular very quickly. It could provide a side window of the bosoms and panties so that folk could click on them if they wanted to, but they would never obliterate the news itself. Are any news outfits today smart enough to do that? That seems uncertain. Viewpoint by Bret Stephens in The New York Times says that most people go along to get along, pretending to enjoy things they don’t, “because the usual emotional companion to intellectual independence isn’t pride or self confidence. It’s loneliness and sometimes crippling self-doubt.” I, as an independent thinker, know whereof he speaks. From the Wit & Wisdom section: “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.” Susan Sontag. I love the convention button that says HELP! THE PARANOIDS ARE AFTER ME! Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s not funny. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Louis Brandeis. I see America careening toward the latter; I wish it were not so. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” W C Fields. They have found a way to generate clean, renewable energy from the humidity in air. Oh, I hope that doesn’t get stifled by the fossil fuel industry! A multivitamin supplement can help prevent memory loss in older folk. “A multivitamin will never be a substitute for a healthy diet,” but it can help. I try to maintain a healthy vegetarian diet, buttressed by a multivitamin and a number of specific supplements like Vitamin C and protein, and I also exercise and try to get seven hours sleep a night. I am told I look twenty years younger than I am, but I’m not sure that my memory is as sharp as it was in my youth. Opinion: Is China attractive for investment? Maybe not. It may be in the early stage of an economic doom loop, with declining population and fleeing capital as its ruler seeks ever more power.

 

THE WEEK June 23, 2023. Trump: “He wants an America where ‘rules are for suckers,’ character is meaningless, and the truth is only what he says it is.” “Trump’s 2024 campaign will be about getting vengeance on his persecutors by any means necessary—and they will not accept defeat. Make no mistake: if other Republicans don’t stop Trump, our ‘democracy is in mortal peril.’” We’ll see. Johns Hopkins University has redefined “lesbian” as a non-man attracted to non-men.” Author J K Rowling, you know, the Harry Potter series, tweets that this defines half the human race as “a vacuum where there is no man-ness.” I agree; what is wrong with terms like “woman” and “lesbian”? Must everything be defined in terms of men or their absence? Talk about sexism! Where will the thought police strike next? I feel that I have something in common with lesbians: we both like women. The North Carolina GOP censured Republican Sen. Thom Tillis for casting votes supporting gay marriage rights and gun control legislation. That says a monstrous amount about North Carolina Republicans, who clearly don’t believe in free speech or voting choices. Four Indigenous children survived the plane crash that killed their mother, and lived in the Amazon jungle for 40 days before being rescued. The eldest, a girl age 13, used her knowledge of the jungle to feed them and keep them alive. Good for her! And AI yet again. It is feared that it poses risks comparable to those of pandemics and nuclear war. It can score in the 99^th percentile on IQ testing today; tomorrow it will vastly surpass that. It could shut down financial markets, power grids, water supplies. It could use trickery to launch nuclear missiles. “It does exactly what you wanted it to do, but not in the way you wanted it to.” Like stopping global warming by eliminating humanity. AI is not coming, it’s here, and we need to shape up. Public schools are getting more interested in using education as indoctrination, rather than giving students the freedom to think for themselves. I grew up in more liberal times, in this respect, but my original thinking led to serious problems; now it seems it is getting worse. A new hotel in Edinburgh has been dubbed “the golden turd” because it resembles the poop emoji. That makes it a tourist attraction. Wit & Wisdom “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want , and deserve to get it good and hard.” H L Mencken. “Time is free, but it’s priceless.” Harvey MacKay. Surprise! The Supreme Court narrowly voted against gerrymandering. It seems it is trying to avoid a public backlash against its undemocratic bias. One significant concern about electric cars is whether there will be sufficient recharging stations to keep them on the road when traveling far from home. Tesla has been setting up stations, and they are proving to be reliable, and now both Ford and General Motors will partner with Tesla to allow their vehicles to use Tesla chargers. It seems likely that Tesla’s standard will prevail in the US. Drive up, plug in, wait 15 to 30 minutes, unplug, and drive off. The Arctic may be ice-free in the 2020s, accelerating global warming. A daily pill may halve the risk of dying from some forms of lung cancer. I hope they keep gaining on that deadly disease. A massive earthquake will someday hit the northwest, triggering a wall of water 60 feet high. It may happen in the next 50 years. Now that we live on the California coast, we have a bit more concern for such events than before, but I think we should be okay.

 

THE WEEK June 30, 2023. Juneteenth, the nineteenth of June, is the celebration of the abolition of slavery in the USA. Only 13 percent of Republicans support it. That says something, doesn’t it? A University of Cincinnati student got a zero on a paper because it used the term “biological women.” Apparently the teacher felt the term was outdated. I was once a teacher; this smells of a malign agenda. If a term is inappropriate, penalize the paper a point. But a zero? I suspect it is the teacher who needs education. Militants attacked a private boarding school in Uganda, killing 37 of its 63 students. I don’t know anything about the issues there, but this strikes me as the slaughter of innocents. What cause can ever justify that? El Nino is coming, promising a warming of the Pacific Ocean on top of the warmest global weather on record. This could trigger hurricanes and cyclones of unprecedented power. I remember a Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The weather is going to get interesting. I hope we don’t see more hurricanes here at Redondo Beach; one of them might not miss us. Affirmative action is meant to ensure that all students, including Black ones, get a fair chance, but it seems that it does not address class. Most graduates of Ivy League colleges come from the middle and upper class. Something better is needed to ensure that all men (and women) are given an equal chance. Guns, again: more guns leads to more deaths from homicide and suicide. Take away the guns and the death rate drops. My sentiment is mixed; I feel that a person who truly wants to die should have the chance to do it, but social and religious restrictions interfere, so the gun is the main way anyone can do it without a horrible hassle. But I would prefer to lock up the guns, and let anyone who wants to die make his case to a court or an adviser and be given the chance if his case is good. Does that sound crazy? Suppose you got an incurable disease that would take you out the moment your family went bankrupt from medical expenses so that your wife would have to turn to prostitution to get enough money to keep your children from starving, and you would slowly sink into a labyrinth of pain and horror as you expired. But you could avoid all of this by taking a pill that would make you sleepy, then wake you up in an hour with your skin turning bright green so it was clear that you would painlessly sleep and die in the next hour if you didn’t take the antidote which is there in the same pillbox, in case you changed your mind. You elect to proceed to the end, and while your wife and children mourn you, they have no financial or social penalty and can go on to satisfactory future lives. Maybe your children grow up to become researchers who find a way to cheaply cure the disease that took you out, and your widowed wife attracts the eye of Prince Charming and marries him, though he knows he will always be second to you in her esteem. Wouldn’t this be better than the present system? Until we have a good answer, I am not sure about banning guns. Viewpoint by David Brooks in The New York Times is that Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. But I suspect that Trump is more like a symptom than a cause; getting him out of the picture won’t cure the MAGAs of their unkind delusions. They will merely find another mouthpiece for their stance. A recent study has found a spectacular decline in sexual activity in France. 43 percent of 18 to 25 year olds had no sexual partners in the past year. What are they doing instead? Online porn and social media platforms. The one sexual act that’s on the rise is masturbation, male and female. This reminds me of a ditty from my youth: “Oh they don’t wear pants in the southern part of France; but they do wear grass, to cover up their ass.” Maybe they should ditch the grass. If I were in a crowd of bare-bottomed young men and women—never mind, I’m married. San Francisco is in a “doom loop,” suffering a plague of homelessness, open drug use, empty streets and rampant crime. Their largest shopping mall is shutting down due to shoplifting, violence against workers, and badly slumping business. Hotels are closing. Their “once-vibrant downtown now feels like a graveyard.” I hope that mischief doesn’t spread to Los Angeles. Wit & Wisdom: “The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.” Samuel Beckett. But it surely feels longer. “I’m so old, the first time I had sex it was in the back of a chariot.” Joan Rivers. Ah, she remembered. The Southern Baptists are making it explicit that women can’t be pastors. In the face of sexual abuse scandals, they are intensifying male dominance. I presume they want it clearly understood that THEY are no part of any modern equal gender movement. A bad flu season is coming, along with a Covid pandemic resurgence. I am going to get my shots. How about you? Big Pharma uses a tactic called pay for delay to hang on to the patents for blockbuster medications longer and stifle competition. This is illegal, but gets decided on a case by case basis, so the gouging continues. My medications are costing me twenty dollars a day, and I’m relatively healthy for my age. I’d like to see more competition.

 

THE WEEK July 7/14, 2023. No, I didn’t skip an issue, they did; they do only 50 in a year. In Congress House Republicans voted to censure Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff for spreading false accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and abused access to classified information, and threatened a $16 million fine. False? Evidence is growing that not only are the accusations true, they are understatements. In Nigeria a man was stoned to death for blasphemy; over there you can’t criticize Muhammad. The equivalent here would be accidentally hitting your thumb with a hammer, swearing “Jesus!” and getting killed for it. Kevin Costner and Christine Baumgartner are divorcing; she wants $248,000 month in child support payments in addition to his covering their private school tuition. Those are expensive children! A page on the continuing Hollywood Writers’ strike. “AI could soon be writing, editing, and even directing movies from start to finish.” If the writers don’t get a piece of that, they may be doomed. I continue to watch with nervous interest. In Honduras, gangs have taken their war to a woman’s prison, where 48 inmates were slaughtered in a battle between two gangs. They were hacking, shooting and doused with flammable liquid. And I thought that women were relatively gentle creatures. A year without Roe: how are things? Young girls have had to bear their rapists’ children, women have endured sepsis and other life threatening emergencies. Abortion has become a huge liability for the GOP. I should think so. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We have only begun to see the “conservative” agenda. Cartoon: “What is the greatest threat to our existence?” One one side is a robot representing Artificial Intelligence. On the other side is a MAGA-type character representing Genuine Stupidity. As I have put it, the world is not run by the Illuminati, but by the Ignoranti. Himalayan glaciers are melting at the fastest rate ever seen. The region is the source of twelve rivers that provide water for nearly two billion people. “We need to seriously commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Florida is being invaded by giant snails that eat everything in sight. I’m glad we got out of there in time; I’d hate to have to try to outrun a snail. Amazon Prime: it seems you can sign up for it with one or two clicks, but it can take a four page, six click, 15 option process to cancel. A civil lawsuit is challenging that. It brings Amazon $25 billion annually. I think I’ll stay clear. Companies would like workers to come back to the office, but many are reluctant, being more efficient at home. In the tech world psychedelic drugs have become a common social lubricant and part of the corporate culture. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk is a ketamine user, a drug used for anesthesia that has some disorienting and hallucinogenic effects, and he is far from alone. I am not into drugs and am satisfied to watch from afar. If they discover Youth Elixir I’ll be really interested. “Forever Chemicals” linger so long in the environment it seems like forever. They have been linked to decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant people, and increased risk of certain cancers. Now there are lawsuits galore against the companies that have fed them into the environment. Can they clean them out? We’ll see. Weight loss: obesity has long been treated as a failure of will rather than a public health problem. New weight loss drugs may finally change that. I am a health nut who eats right, sleeps right, avoids drugs, avoids stress, and who keeps my weight at my college level. I do have discipline. My father was similar, lean and fit, until at about age 90 he must have suffered a stroke that took out a key circuit, so he stopped exercising and started eating, and when he died at age 93 he weighed too much to stand by himself. He might have lived to 100 otherwise. I am 89, and wary of 90 for that reason. I mean to stay lean throughout, but if I were to suffer such a stroke and lose my discipline, I hope that such a drug is available for me.

 

THE WEEK July 21, 2023. Things are heating up, July 4^th was the hottest day, globally, ever recorded, probably the hottest in the past 125,000 years. When are we frogs going to jump out of this pond? Question: have conservative Supreme Court Justices gone ‘rogue,” shredding legal doctrine to impose their personal and religious views on the nation? The indications are, yes. There is increasing evidence of systematic atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. 90,000 may be just a fraction. Torture chambers have been found in liberated sections. One example: Russians raped a woman with her husband present, then sexually assaulted him, then forced their four year old daughter to perform oral sex on a soldier in front of both parents. A man robbed an Indianapolis woman of $100, then asked her on Facebook for a date, saying she was too pretty to rob. Nearly half of US tap water contains “forever chemicals,” mentioned in the prior issue, so they are hard to escape. Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, shows real promise to be a Democratic candidate for president should Biden falter. She seems to have the stuff. A marine algae is sickening sea lions on California beaches; more than a thousand have been affected, and we fear that MaryLee’s auditory pet Sir Barksalot is among them. We are sad. A book about the Sullivanians, a cult in New York 1957-1991, describes hot it attracted convents by the promise of instant community, plentiful sex with multiple partners, and a cure for their psychological hang-ups. Meta’s Twitter clone Threads is gaining a foothold as Twitter falters. Will in flourish? Within hours of it launch its accounts were posting about the Illuminati and “billionaire satanists” while other users compared each other to Nazis and battled everything from gender identity to violence in the West Bank. Seems like more of the same to me, though I don’t patronize any of the online societies. Many Americans are migrating to states that feel more in tune with their values. MaryLee and I did that, moving from Florida to California, but that was largely coincidence. The ideal residence for us just happened to be on the California coast. We did check out the Florida coast, as my tree farm is inland, but nothing quite clicked. But we do feel more comfortable socially here.