Tyrants

There are few things that annoy me more than Tyrannosaurus Trump.

First of all he's an asshole.

Second of all he's an asshole.

...

Infinity of all he's an asshole.

Filling The Swamp

 I've decided to just ignore the world as it crumbles around me. What can I do alone?  


 Someday there might be sentient beings living on this planet.  



 I am a little worried they might not be humanoids, nor even animals. Not even plants. Just transistors.

The Age Of Trump

Here we are in the age of Trump. Maybe things will be solved by time. He eats junk food and is very overweight. His wife hates him, his children are sycophants afraid to lose their inheritance and he probably fears anyone he hasn't known for many years. Therefore he fears his bodyguards, the Secret Service, the entire Pentagon and most of his cooks - as well as all of us in the world.

It is easy to throw around the word Nazi to stir people's emotions. In this case, however, there are members of his inner circle jerk who are White Supremacists, Fascists and probably Nazis. I doubt Trump himself even knows what the term really means. He knows what KKK means, because he spent some time denying he knew what that meant. Even microcephalics have a good idea what KKK means, so his denials smell funny.

Anyway, I hope my children and grandchildren of mine and of my extended family are able to weather the Trump storm. But I feel that America has been ruined forever.

Democracy, what Democracy?

It has been a while since I've written anything worth posting, assuming that this one is worth it. 

I am very angry with America. Not just the racists and idiots that have always been here. Not just the federal government with all of the stupidity and shooting of the feet that goes on there. Not just the pigs and gluttons who squeeze all the blood from the weak and poor. Not just the polluters that are committing crimes against the Earth, let alone humanity. 

I am angry that after 60 years we still must maintain the nuclear weapons that could end all civilization throughout the world, if not kill off a large number of species entirely.

I am angry that religions, who by definition depend entirely on faith since they cannot show a single proof that any of them are the true religion, even in the face of each illogically screeching that they are the only true one amongst hundreds.

I am angry that my children are subjected to violence and discrimination by virtue of not being "lily white", as though being a Pacific Islander makes them somehow inferior to the Europeans who murdered most of their ancestors.

I am angry that our experiment with Democracy has crumbled into squabbling blather composed of pure lies and propaganda designed by the oligarchs who are totally opposed to Democracy, which gets in their way of starving their workers and poisoning the Earth.

I could go on, of course, but why bother? What good will it do? I will vote against all that stuff, of course. But if there is no Democracy, what good is any vote? The only vote that counts nowadays is to not buy anything at all from those who are destroying us -- to boycott everything you don't need from chemical companies, petroleum companies, big box stores and so forth.

  Even that has its harm -- you may have employment there, or you can save money by shopping there. The less everyone buys the less money there is for paying them. Essentially there is a trap -- vote against the oligarchs, whether by ballot or by boycott, and suffer a reprisal. If you are one of those who are suffering already, then it is obvious the oligarchs are not helping you.

The greatest fear use to be "oligarchical totalitarian communism", however the greatest enemy to you personally and to your descendants is "oligarchical totalitarian capitalism". There is nothing more destructive to our future as the human race.  

Guns

During my years of designing software, especially during the development of image recognition systems, there was often an emphasis on military applications. The recent rise of the machines using various drones and other remote sensor robotics has reminded me of that time of my life. 

The recent gun control argument in the US has brought to the forefront a great discussion on the merits or demerits of owning and carrying weapons. Most of the time the military use of weapons is restricted to wars or training, however the advent of terrorism has become the issue for those weapons, especially in its use of modern technology.

The AK47 is a rather formidable machine gun, able to survive rough treatment and neglect and then be used reliably in battle. Various other military machine guns are used for other purposes, although most of them are very expensive. The AK47 is cheap and used by most of US enemies.

One detectable feature common to nearly all such guns is the use of steel. Barrels and firing mechanisms especially must be strong and resistant to damage during the rough conditions of battle. Plastic grips or even magazines and belts might be OK, lightening the weapons somewhat, but steel is the primary weight of those kinds of devices.

Imagine a 1 meter sphere plunging to the Earth, with the balance of weight near the bottom, with a last few seconds deceleration by parachute just before hitting the ground. Once touching, the parachute is ignited and burns completely away, so that nothing entangles the device. A spike preceded the ball and pierced deep into the ground, solidly anchoring the sphere which then unfolds like flower petals to expose a small machine gun fitted with a motor and computer vision enabled telescopic sight.

Instantly, within a second or so of anchoring, the device begins to rotate so that the firing end of the gun is pointed outward toward the area that the camera can view, in a full 360 degrees. The computer watches the camera images and detects multiple frequencies, including microwave, visible and infra-red. The first rotation of the device takes about a second, after which all points detected by the camera and determined to be steel and shaped like weapons are selected as targets.

The next rotation involves firing upon all selected targets. Once the magazine of the device is empty, or all targets have been eliminated, firing stops. After a siren begins to wail, which is intended to warn off nearby "non-targets", a timer will count down until after perhaps 1 minute or less, the device will explode like a land mind.

The explosion is not primarily for lethality, only to prohibit such devices from being captured, at least in large numbers. The electronics and camera devices of the machine will be utterly destroyed, leaving only the metal parts of the gun behind, although mangled. Therefore, once their mission has been accomplished, they erase themselves.

Obviously the possibility of friendly fire and mistaken metal non-weapons in the hands of innocents would be a problem. Therefore the recognition software employed by the device would be parametrized to detect ONLY military weapons which will be shaped in certain ways, reflect microwaves in certain ways or whatever. 

In such a future combat, holding a weapon would be a liability. What would then most likely result would be a somewhat evolved enemy who would learn from the experiences and employ weapons in a different, more difficult to detect manner. Wrapping all weapons in tin-foil, wearing wire mesh garments, and other shielding mechanisms might work for a while, however such diversions would be short-lived, since the devices would also be capable of bidirectional communication using light or whatever band is the least noisy. All events would be recorded, much like gun-camera recordings in UAVs or piloted planes.

Anyone caught wearing wire mesh, using tin foil or whatever would merely be targeted as secondary targets, in the case that primary targets were unavailable. Unarmed or non-metallic objects would be completely free from selection, however there might always be the chance of deflected bullets or shrapnel injuring people unintentionally. 

The scenario I have described is only a single instance of robotics. There are many other weapons used by terrorists or enemy combatants that fall outside these parameters. However those kinds of weapons are usually suited to larger offensive weapons platforms, i.e. artillery, missiles and bombs. Others are only able to be confronted up close and personal.

None of the above designs were actually developed, to my knowledge. There were only discussions of all possible countermeasures and side effects. I don't personally want to be responsible for any deaths for any reasons outside self-defence. 

Yet I find it ironic that people want to wear guns when those very devices make them stand out as targets to the increasingly more sophisticated robotic systems that are proliferating in our world.

The Sum of all Religions

Religion (Photo credit: Rickydavid)

As I look around the Earth in this time, with not much time left for myself relative to the great age of this planet, I have become very sad. I suppose the sadness could have merely resulted from mental processes, such as decreasing neurotransmitters of various kinds, so that I can be labeled with some psychiatric term of depression or generalized anxiety or whatever. After all I have family, I have grand children that give me occasional happy times. But I think my sadness is a result of the information bombarding me from every direction as I grow older. Much of that information is of a oppressive, socially pathetic nature.

I think about religion in a general sense, mainly because I have no religion of my own. This was not my own choice, however. I was raised in many, mostly Christian religions of various denominations, resulting in a kind of confusion and annoyance that there was so much reliance on magical thinking. My childhood was very bleak at times which taught me that magic never works, and that merely praying for things to get better was no different that waving magic wands about. It always failed.

I read the Bible, regardless, thinking that it might be that I have not studied it sufficiently, and that God would not respond to me unless I found just the right combination of thoughts and words to make my prayers worthy. Unfortunately for religion, I found only a vast number of illogical, magical incantations in all those words, as if the authors (so many, not just God himself) were sickened by fungus or other diseases that effected the mind. I suppose if I were building temples some of that information may have been instructive, but otherwise it was like listening to insane people who fear every little thing.

Not only one Bible (i.e. the King James Version), I also read several others in a special version, The Parallel  Bible, that involved four parallel translations so that more modern languages could be compared with the flowery and somewhat arcane language of King James. Many times the previous Latin, Greek or other ancient languages were translated differently by different monks and scholars so that the passages were very differently interpreted. 

One very pronounced problem, though, was that I had also read many history books and literature from before the Christian era -- from India, Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, China and so forth. All of those cultures also had their own religions (most labeled as Pagan by Christians) but in any case all having various versions of the Creation of the World, of Man, and of all the other things around us. There was a great variation, of course, but also a kind of similarity between many of them, such that the stories in the Bible seemed as though they were re-described variations on a theme. The Bible was not primary, and was not unique. It was just one collection of stories among thousands.

Therefore, since I could not just concentrate on one work of literature by tearing all the others out of my neural connections, it was impossible for me to believe in one religion at the expense of all the others. Each claimed to be the only "true" religion and all the others "false", which is logically impossible. Also, if one tries to believe the angry-voiced, shouting preachers from the American farmlands, it gives the impression that God hates everything and everybody and wants to destroy it all. At the same time, the same angry-voice preachers shout that God loves everybody, and had his son tortured and murdered for some unknown reason, which is supposed to save all the rest of us from merciless destruction in the Apocalypse.

Whatever. I could never allow this to influence my professional life, which involved computers and logic in such intricate detail that I could never give credence to magical thinking ever again, no matter what the consequences. This proved to be fine so far as employment was concerned, but resulted in great strife so far as family and social aspects of life were involved. Most (and I do mean the great majority) of people around me were aghast that I had no religion -- that I was devoid of belief. 

That word -- belief -- is the kicker. In my world of digital computers and even analog electronics, belief does not mean anything. Things either work or they don't work. If they work I get paid, if they don't work I get fired. It is as simple as that. Belief doesn't cut it -- only absolute proof is good enough.

So, I learned to treat the entire world as a collection of Dynamic Data. All the pieces in ever-changing data could potentially be true but could equally be false, at any given time. Until each point in a set of data is tested against all the others, the truth or falsehood thereof could not be determined. It is not possible to "believe" that a particular bit of memory is a "1". I have no idea unless I look and see at some moment in time. It might very well be a "1" at the moment I look, but become a "0" immediately after, so my belief would not be accurate. Belief is meaningless in such collection of data. 

A computer could  never have a religion. And it is not because it has no soul. It is merely because blind faith does not work inside a computer. All things are possible to be right or wrong in a particular context, but could fail at any moment. The computer must always assume that -- all data could be false because of a failure in its electronic components -- and that only an outside agent, such as a human or even  some  collection of other computers, can determine that any individual computer is operating correctly.

I could just as well have errors in my brain which cause me to judge the events in the world incorrectly. I have to assume, at all times, that I might be wrong about everything I know. My memory might fail, my vision might fail, my entire consciousness might fail -- at any moment. 

I have no way of determining, all by myself, whether or not that I am tied to a hospital bed, imagining all this. So how could I ever have blind faith in anything, let alone in a self-referential religion with no means of testing its truth or falsehood? All my current knowledge, of science, of philosophy, of all the people I know, is just the sum of all my experiences as well as the sum of all religions - of all belief systems that ever existed. And I could be wrong about everything. And so can everyone else.

Killing Or Culling

The most obvious problem with the world is the number of humans who rule over it. If there was any way to magically reduce that number without some kind of holocaust or apocalypse it would have already happened. There are not many who would simply murder everyone indiscriminately, however there are a few -- people who want to nuke everything instead of solving the difficult underlying problems. There are also people to whom eugenics stills rings attractively.

The modern political parties are composed of many different mindsets, some based on religion, some based on money, some based on the environment, some based purely on military power, etc. Almost all roads lead to money, since almost nothing can be accomplished it, or without some kind of economic system. Of course a barter system could be established but that requires massive exchanges of physical items, with all the attendant energy needs and immense labor. This works for many of the rich countries possessing coal, oil, gold, industrial metals, gems, foods, and so forth.

The US has huge amounts of agricultural products that we trade around the world for whatever things we want. This depends on technology in the current age, which in turn depends mostly on oil and coal. Our huge amounts of coal may be of some comfort to us, however the amount of oil in the world is becoming more technologically and economically difficult to sustain. There is also a lot of methane gas to burn in somewhat cleaner ways, although the sustainability of those gas fields are not much more stable than petroleum.

Ecological problems from the use of fossil fuels and overproduction of mono-cultured foods can be ignored for the sake of graphs and corporate profits, yet there are no possible ways to extend those graphs and profits indefinitely into the future without a tragic, apocalyptic crash.

It is not a problem that can be solved in time with our infinitely increasing population. The people in power, especially those with vast personal wealth, will try to hide from the problems, in villas and private islands with guards and roadside weaponry for as long as possible. After that becomes a useless technique, itself doomed to exhaustion of resources, then only the deaths of the majority of Earth's people can result, including many of the less protected wealthy in the worst areas.

Science did not invent human suffering, however it has been both the bearer of great relief and the bearer of great suffering, always unintended, always with a polarity in both the directions of good and evil. Weapons seem to always come first, either for hunting or for battles with other humans. Peace is attained for a while, during which more knowledge is gained, more weapons invented, more wars, and then, hopefully, more peace. 

In this century, the 21st in our manner of counting time, we shall know in which manner science will bring about the apocalypse, or more hopefully, a readjustment of our relationship with the other inhabitants of Earth. Wealth will not help you because you cannot take it with you. Religion seems only to fan the flames of discord and offers little but prayer as a solution to profoundly difficult problems. One can always hope that God will grant personal miracles, preventing a plane wreck from harming a single surviving child for instance. If God was so inclined, it would have been far less gruesome to prevent the plane wreck entirely. After all, God is supposed to be omnipotent and all that.

The biological function of the entire Earth is difficult to measure in total. Since we cannot possibly visit every high pressure subsurface location on the planet we can only estimate the effects of all human activity on the chemistry that supports us. We seem to think we can just adapt the way bacteria adapt, after all we were able to travel to the Moon and back alive. This may be true but bacteria have been in all the locations of Earth that we can never go to. Bacteria can adapt very rapidly because their cell division is usually far more rapid than more complex organisms like us. With each division comes the possibility of change. Change allows adaptation, even to extremely harsh conditions. We can only have generational babies every 16-20 years or so, allowing much slower adaptation to altered chemistry.

Also, much evolution results in the extermination of the species which were not so lucky. Even if a species survives it might only be due to a small number of lucky individuals to survive any severe changes, much like the survivors of pandemics like flu, small pox or bubonic plague. There are also very bad trade offs in such survival, for instance the sickle cell blood adaptation to malaria parasites.

The faith we have in science to solve all the problems we cause ourselves using science is a whimsy. Science is only a tool like a shovel. A shovel can dig a grave just as easily as a ditch. I intend to use it as a constructive tool for as long as I am around. But I don't pretend that I can prevent the apocalypse or stave off mass starvation of humans and other animals.