Category Archives: Culture

The Singularity Is Here

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The paragraphs below is a literal quote from an article in the November Atlantic Magazine.

Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies.

By Ayad Akhtar

Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.

That we are subject to the dominion of endless digital surveillance is not news. And yet, the sheer scale of the domination continues to defy our imaginative embrace. Virtually everything we do, everything we are, is transmuted now into digital information. Our movements in space, our breathing at night, our expenditures and viewing habits, our internet searches, our conversations in the kitchen and in the bedroom—all of it observed by no one in particular, all of it reduced to data parsed for the patterns that will predict our purchases.

But the model isn’t simply predictive. It influences us. Daniel Kahneman’s seminal work in behavioral psychology has demonstrated the effectiveness of unconscious priming. Whether or not you are aware that you’ve seen a word, that word affects your decision making. This is the reason the technology works so well. The regime of screens that now comprises much of the surface area of our daily cognition operates as a delivery system for unconscious priming.

Mariner the Zealot

Travelin’

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Autumn is traveling season for mariner and his wife. They are off to visit far flung relatives and friends. As the days grow cool and the wind chills the face in a way that hasn’t been felt since early spring, one is reminded of the passing of time. It is a time when melancholy may leak into one’s thoughts.

This fall in particular may bring on depression and fear. The entire world is in dire straits. No one can truly predict the twists and turns of the near future. In the United States, democracy and Constitutional freedom are frayed and dangling as the nation drifts into a serious split between authoritarian government and individual freedom to choose.

This political cleavage is deep, deep to the core foundations of the American way of life. Like a festering cancer it has been growing since the end of the Second World War. It is a battle between haves and have nots; it is a battle between racial elitism and equality for everyone; it is a battle between government and private enterprise; it a battle between tradition and science; it is a battle been humanity and the planet itself.

When one reads about the great tragedies of history, it is difficult to put one’s self into what it really must have felt like when Vesuvius erupted or the sudden flooding of the Middle East when the Black Sea broke through the Dardanelles or when the Spanish invaded and murdered the innocent cultures of the Americas or even today living under a Syrian dictatorship that gives no quarter with freedom of thought.

But now we know. Poverty is a growing disease growing as fast as any Covid invasion yet it remains invisible to the rest of the nation. The have nots continue to pay for the wealth and indiscretion of the haves, and they are paying with their very lives. This is slavery in modern form. Today the numbers of deprived have spilled out of the barrios into a labor class which has been denied equality of any kind for forty years – and who vent their anger by electing an incompetent President who has set the nation’s self-image back to the Revolutionary War and who blatantly tried to disrupt a national election.

Now we know.

Mariner thinks of an old automobile that is worn and rusted. It is time to buy a new one. What will it look like? How much will it cost? Will the old clunker keep running until then? Mariner, an old folk, thinks longingly about having a donkey cart. But he knows the future will not allow the past.

Does anyone know the future?

Ancient Mariner

 

The countdown begins

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In a couple of weeks, the nation will be exactly one year from the 2022 General Election. Yes, we feel like this is a long way out there but the party troops have been organizing for months. Trump republicans are locked in to win their primaries and have spent a fortune in state promotions. Most elected representatives and senators are from guaranteed republican states.

The Constitution mandates 435 House members distributed according to population. Currently 220 are democrat, 212 are republican and there are 3 vacancies. Looking at state representation, 22 states are democratic and 28 are republican – including 23 republican states where the Governor, legislature and courts are all republican. Ironically, just 19 percent of the nation’s population lives in these red states.

Both parties have split in two; the republicans have become enchanted by authoritarian capitalism while the democrats have championed a socialist revolution reminiscent of the 1960s. Add to this the results of the 2020 census which moved several representative seats toward the south and west. [Based on population shifts recorded in the 2020 Census, there were six US states that gained congressional House seats: Texas (2), Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida, and North Carolina; and seven states that lost seats: New York, Illinois, California, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.]

This noisy imbalance, in a nation based on one person, one vote has reached a painful cacophony – which falls upon the citizenry like bird droppings (Mariner loves to mix metaphors). At a time when the planet is racing into a totally new reality, the world’s most profound democracy is dropping bird poop.

Another issue is the age of the legislators who stopped experiencing new insights in the 1990s. Below is an excerpt from an HBO interview with republican senator Bill Cassidy. The interviewer is Mike Allen:

 

“1 big thing: Senator backs senility test

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, told me during an interview that he favors cognition tests for aging leaders of all three branches of government.

  • Why it matters: Wisdom comes with age. But science also shows that we lose something. And much of the world is now run by old people — including President Biden, 78 … Speaker Pelosi, 81 … Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 70 … and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 79.

Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, told me during our wide-ranging interview in Chalmette, La., that in your 80s, you begin a “rapid decline.”

  • Noting he wasn’t talking about specific people, Cassidy said: “It’s usually noticeable. So anybody in a position of responsibility who may potentially be on that slope, that is of concern. And I’m saying this as a doctor.”
  • “I’m told that there have been senators in the past who, at the end of their Senate terms were senile,” Cassidy added. “I’m told that was true of senators of both parties.”

Cassidy said it’d be reasonable for Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and executive branch leaders to submit to an annual evaluation in which they would have to establish cognitive sharpness.

  • “We each have a sacred responsibility to the people of the United States,” Cassidy said. “It is not about me. It is about my ability to serve the people.”

Mariner has great expectations for the 2022 election. Don’t you?

Ancient Mariner

It is time.

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Mariner, for the sake of sanity, has stepped back from daily behavioral response to frightful, deliberately agitating news programs. Saner are selected on-line news sources, books and magazines. He is careful, as a citizen, to maintain his obligation to a national democracy; he is responsible to elect meaningful representatives to HIS government.

But mariner has begun to wonder. Is democracy becoming old fashioned? Is it the right philosophy of government for an era where international politics are growing more influential than national politics? Is the new global economy too expensive for a typical citizen to invest in and participate? Will each nation simply play the role of a labor union to reconcile humanistic virtues vis-à-vis international corporate politics? Will, in fact, super-sized corporations replace national governments? Who will govern the corporations?

As though to tease our brains, many of these questions already have emerging answers that seem to be pulling everyone into an age of supersizing – certainly causing stress on religion, secularism, humanism and the old fashioned descriptions of capitalism, socialism and communism. At the moment, without exception, the new frontier is fed and run by money.

Immediately important today is our concept of taxation. The rich have won the war on taxation: the richer one is, the less percentage tax they pay to the point of paying none; the same with corporations. It is the excessive wealth among a few that can launch a global plutocracy.

Ironically, the distrust between citizens has led to populism and identity politics, in effect dividing citizens one against the other while the rich unify their economic purposes.

If humans are to remain the significant influencer in human history, it may be that democracy is the last defense against authoritarian oligarchy. Democracy depends on an identity that evolves from human ethic while authoritarian oligarchy vacuums profit that denies human ethic. An excellent example is that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have the finances to underwrite a useless trip into the solar system while billions of humans live stressed, inadequate lives.

In short, our defense is to unify, to become one human force that controls its ethical experience. It is not a time to destroy democratic election processes; it is not a time to quibble over a measly trillion (many individuals in the world could pay out a trillion by themselves). It is not time to pretend superiority by hiding behind race and other social issues. It is time to defend the very core of humanity.

Will someone tell the electorate?

Ancient Mariner

Skipping through the news

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֎ A quote from Politico news:

“The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that Facebook treats users’ posts differently depending on their wealth, privilege and status. That and other findings based on internal Facebook documents indicate Facebook “presented different, contradictory versions of these policies in public and private. From a securities regulation standpoint, any big lie could potentially defraud investors and invite an investigation” by the Securities and Exchange Commission, per Jena Martin, a former SEC attorney and now law professor.”

‘nuff said. Big data needs regulation.

 

֎ Remember TPP? Congress failed to approve the treaty and Donald cut off political ties later. What was agreed by the other eleven nations became the ‘Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership’ (CPTPP). Today, China is attempting to join the agreement which, of course, would destroy the original purpose to control China’s influence in the Pacific Rim. CPTPP representatives are begging Joe Biden to hurry up and join the treaty. International supply chain treaties need an anchor economy that only two or three nations can provide.

 

֎ Mariner had a romantic image of Venezuela, once a wealthy member of OPEC, even though its governments traditionally have been faux democracies dominated by authoritarianism. Today Venezuela is under an abusive dictatorship which has led to seven straight years of excessive inflation. Ironically, gasoline is heavily rationed and very expensive. Having no transportation, few citizens can find work. The nation has 28 million citizens; 21 million live in extreme poverty.

Several South American nations are struggling economically. China has been investing heavily in these nations to become the key economic provider. Hah! Not America – South Americans aren’t Caucasian and they are immigrants.

Stupid America.

 

֎ Britney Spears at least has booted her father off the conservatorship. Let’s hope she can kill the remaining control held by a CPA firm. Conservatorship is one of those conditions mariner groups under ‘Matrix Management’, referring to the movie The Matrix and the control by intelligent machines over humans – using them only to generate electricity and feeding them a false reality. The street term is ‘bloodsucker’.

Anyone who finds themselves in a position of being the middleman between a person and the world cannot help but become a bloodsucker. This condition expresses itself across many social phenomena from stock fund managers to anti-abortion to domineering parents to sport coaches to abusive spouses. If there were not some benefit to the bloodsucker, they wouldn’t bother with the overhead.

Go Britney.

 

The reader may not hear from mariner with regularity during October. He and his wife are traveling the nation to catch up on the wellbeing of family and friends. Besides, the news needs a break from mariner’s effusive commentary.

Ancient Mariner

 

Immigration, Climate Change and Housing

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These three subjects eventually will be at the center of political, economic and cultural life not only in the United States but around the world. ‘Eventually’ means in about ten to fifteen years from now.

Immigration. The current increase in immigration along the Gulf Coast and Mexico largely is Central Americans escaping brutal, terrorist-controlled nations. But recently it includes Haitians – a first of its kind wave due to global warming. Each year the number of immigrants easily could grow by a power of ten (10, 100, 1,000, etc.) as coastal areas around the world force inhabitants to relocate due to flooding and sea rise. In Bangladesh already 4 million people have been displaced. The coastline between Houston, Texas and Pensacola, Florida already has suffered extreme and prolonged weather conditions that are permanently displacing thousands of families. Austin, Texas, a city only on a river and away from the coast,  had to buy large acreages from the public to let the land return to a wild state that will protect shorelines.

In a few years American migrants will outnumber foreign immigrants. The current Congress and Administration tinker about trying to retain reelection leverage rather than facing a rapidly growing dilemma for which there is no plan, no allocated resources and no idea of a solution. The issue is so dire that mariner suspects eventually the Government will create an independent, apolitical commission to deal with the issue. Of the three topics in this post, Immigration/migration will be the most disruptive in the shortest amount of time.

Climate Change. It isn’t just flooding by rising seas and turbulent storms. Between 2040 and 2060 extreme temperatures will become commonplace in the South and Southwest, with some counties in Arizona experiencing temperatures above 95 degrees for half the year. The entire southeast sector of the United States will be too warm for current farm crops. This affects a significant part of the agricultural economy and in its own right will force thousands of farm workers and farm owners to migrate north – even into Canada.

Still, it is flooding along the coasts that will drive large migrations. As many as eleven major metropolitan areas in the U.S. will have to deal with total destruction or major Dutch-style dams and walls. The exact number is hard to project given all the variables but several estimates suggest that as many as 13 million Americans will be displaced in the next few decades.

Housing. Mariner remembers inflation during the 1970s. Housing costs rose by 17 percent; many entrepreneurs became millionaires just by buying and reselling their homes every six months. Climate change will induce a similar inflation in the cost of homes. Anyone can guess how bad inflation will be but it will be significant and disruptive. Even today there is inflation in housing cost because there aren’t enough homes due to the impact of Covid and the reorganization of large corporations.

Concern. Recent polls of the younger population indicate that climate change already is the number one concern. Second is lack of confidence in any U.S. government – which they blame as the cause of global warming. Mariner will cite only one of many telling clues that Congress has no idea how overwhelming global warming is: One Senator from a small coal mining state willfully prevents funding for climate change because he won’t be reelected by his coal mining electorate. Multiply this attitude by all the elected officials in this nation. Who to blame – the official’s greediness or the electorate’s ignorance?

Ancient Mariner

Changing the Sails

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Mariner saw that the reconciliation bill in Congress is available for review and download. He was eager to scan through the document to have a sense of its direction. The first page of titles came on the computer screen. In small print it said the bill has 2,465 pages! Scanning this document would be like crossing the Atlantic Ocean one glass of water at a time. It is true that the reconciliation bill is a benchmark bill that if passed would shift the national philosophy in a direction that hasn’t been active since the early 1960s.

Despite the Vietnam War and the racial riots during the sixties, there was an air of emerging freedom and opportunity. This air of future happiness (it was called Camelot) faded quickly after JFK’s assassination in 1963 and died along with Bobby’s assassination in 1968. The 1968 election was as raucous as the 2020 election.

LBJ took over after the JFK assassination and pushed through the remaining key legislation (intended to build A Great Society) that in those days made exceptional progress for civil rights, tax cuts, Medicare and other liberal programs that haven’t been headline news until the current Presidency. When Lyndon did not run for a second term and diminished support for the Vietnam War, the war was doomed very much like Afghanistan today.

So the nation has come full circle. Shamefully, the nation has made little progress toward racial equality, has put back rich-friendly tax rates and now faces competition from the planet itself. Further, the third branch of government, the courts, is not the neutral arm it is supposed to be – despite Justice Breyer’s new book to the contrary[1]. The public trust of the courts has fallen into the 40 percent range. This is serious because the courts are the trusted ballast that prevents storm waves from coming over the gunnel and sinking the ship – something that destructive bias causes.

It is a hellish time, in the midst of a hurricane, to try to turn the sails toward a new image of nationhood. Mariner fears that the sails can’t be turned during the next several election cycles. The nation needs a new crew in Congress; the rudder of electoral representation is broken; the electorate is as clueless as the government at this point. In the midst of this hurricane is a tornado called climate change which will make current issues about immigration and housing seem like child’s play.

However, let’s hold onto hope that the electorate is tired of this crap and may surprise us in coming elections.

Ancient Mariner

[1] The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.

Let it Be

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Here’s a humbling statement from mariner’s desk calendar:

“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

– Helen Keller

“Fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Everyone understands the virtue of fidelity. It represents commitment to something which requires personal value and personal discipline. Anyone, without regard for faith, politics or personal circumstances has some obligation to an idea or behavior that shapes their life and sets the standard for daily behavior.

No one would make it through a day without some set of values that keeps them anchored to who they are, what they need and how they interact with reality. While it is true that many of us need to improve our skills when dealing with daily life, the real issue is fidelity to what?

One can’t fault the fidelity of Trump followers; the question is whether that set of values is worthy of fidelity. One can’t fault the fidelity of socialist liberals; the question is whether that set of values is worthy of fidelity. This criticism can be made about any opinion. The question that must be answered is, “are these values worthy of fidelity?”

Frankly, the world, its nations and its societies are in great transition – some may say dysfunctional. What will future society look like? Taking into consideration the fact that many social institutions are on decline, e.g., churches, colleges, social service organizations, governments at all levels, reduced income opportunities and the intense interruption of global warming, what institutional structure will rise to overcome all the trauma?

Mariner suspects it will be small communities; perhaps urban neighborhoods as well; populations of about 1,500 – 10,000 or so. What has slowly disappeared is community bonding. The large agricultural family has all but disappeared; the ease of travel and a broad range of employment opportunities leave much of the population without the friendly surroundings of large families, local clubs, or common career familiarity. In mariner’s small town, the glue provided by large, multi-generational families is gone. The many clubs and organizations that afforded social gathering have dwindled to a precious few and no longer set the pace for the town; the common employment base of agriculture is a memory.

Nevertheless, in the name of sanity people must belong to something meaningful in their daily life. Without community, society cannot heal, grow or reorganize. Without community fidelity, more sophisticated institutions cannot be stable.

The best thing you can do to weather this era is to be friendly and helpful with your neighbors.

Remember the words from the Beatles song ‘Let it Be’?

“And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree

There will be an answer, let it be

For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see

There will be an answer, let it be”

When government fails, when society is disheveled, when calamity and uncertainty are in the air, people will gather into small groups to minimize fear, provide social stability, and establish common fidelity.

Evolution has declared that Homo sapiens is a tribal creature.

Let it be.

Ancient Mariner

 

Evangelical Similarities

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At the top of the news these days is the social conflagration occurring in Afghanistan. Women are being shoved out of a male dominated, religiously-based power structure that will run the nation and its culture for the foreseeable future. Ironically, a similar situation exists in the United States where religious denominations suffer the same ‘divine male power’ syndrome.

The book that delves into this issue is ‘Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation’ by Kristin Kobes du Mez. The book documents ideas about masculinity in the white Evangelical church and its politics which, while not as violent or intrusive as the Taliban, are eerily similar. Kristin Du Mez said “Trump’s four years in the White House made painfully clear just how deep these divisions ran.” About a quarter of Americans describe themselves as evangelical protestants; that’s tens of millions of people according to polling by Pew Research Center. 14% are white evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and that evangelical population grew among white Americans during the Trump administration.

This is another fissure opening in this age of social change rife with computerization, racial upheaval, women’s rights, and an increasingly oligarchical economy. The ‘white Christian’ tag is present in other denominations as well.

Americans must admit that national legislation, whether Federal, state or local, still limits women’s rights and underplays male accountability to be fair and nonjudgmental. The fact that years of rape cases documented in police records have gone unprocessed is just one example. The fact that sexual abuse to women is as blatant and ignored as to tolerate gross abuse to an entire team of female Olympic gymnasts is just one example. The fact that a woman does not have the right to make decisions about her own body with respect to abortion is just one example. The fact that the rate of pay for the same job across the United States even in modern industries pays women 82 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Perhaps Americans should take note of the Taliban and cast the mote from their own nation.

Ancient Mariner

Interplanetary Travel

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Mariner is an old codger – almost as old as many legislators. The truth is, the world today is quite alien to him. It is not his planet. Back on his planet, there is a President named John F. Kennedy; in fifteen minutes Charles Kuralt tells the news of the world with no gossip, no allegiance to viewer share, no conspiracy threats. Social media does not exist, only thick daily newspapers with pages of funnies and sports; mariner delivered them every day for a few years.

Computers are around but they don’t poke into everyone’s business. The U.S. is at war, as usual, but it is a strange no-bullet war with Russia. There are no mass shootings of children every month or so. In fact, when mariner was 12 years old, he would take the streetcar downtown without even knowing about the social dangers that lurk the streets on this planet. On mariner’s planet policemen walk their neighborhood beats and stop to pass the time of day.

Mariner could go on and on about how different his planet is from this planet. On this planet, he feels out of place and irrelevant because he does not understand this world. He is not rooted in the life of a child who is given a computer tablet in kindergarten. It likely is appropriate training for children on this planet but mariner finds himself confused about social values. Humanist philosophy is at a nadir.

Even television on this planet seems irrelevant. Mariner switched to a modern ‘smart’ television to no avail; little is of interest. The few programs he watches are broadcast on his planet. Listening to news today speaks only of Armageddon. Mariner’s planet, while it has issues, has no reason to fear the future demise of humanity.

But mariner can visit his planet. There is a dimension called ‘music’ that has a direct link to his planet. He steps into this dimension by listening to what people on this planet call golden oldies. Golden, indeed, and eternal.

Stack up the old 45 with names like Penguins, Everly Brothers, Presley, Ronstadt, Platters, Domino, Brightman, Little Richard, Carpenters, Ray Charles, Joni James and Cline. Or capture the next decade with Diamond, Denver, Peter, Paul and Mary, and ABBA. Mariner settles down in the music space ship chair and travels back to his planet.

Ancient Mariner