Artificial Iscariot

Leave a comment

It was only a matter of time.  A recent story on 404 Media confirmed what others had suspected, Amazon is ordering large numbers of rare books and destroying them so they can be scanned for AI “learning.”  Apart from the infuriating aspect—some of us save up our money to afford rare books—is the flawed premise behind the whole AI craze.  Words, as much as I love them, do not embrace the entirety of the the thinking process.  Scientists have argued for years that feeling—emotion—is essential to how we think.  We don’t understand emotions, but we do know they’re an essential part of being both biological and conscious.  Other animals experience them too.  Destroying books so they don’t have to pay to use copyrighted material stirs an emotional as well as a rational response.  All for a fad.

Generative AI is a waste of money and resources.  Sure, it can look things up quicker than I can, but it can also lie and hallucinate and make things up.  It wastes my time by sending me bogus emails.  It’s after my savings.  And yours too.  People don’t want the massive data centers required to process this one part of human experience.  Kids who grew up emulating Mr. Spock, perhaps uncomfortable with their own emotions, are now trying to run the world.  Like all fascists they do so by destroying books.  The end game isn’t to make life easier.  It’s to make a product to sell.  To take over the marketplace.  To take books that can’t be replaced, cut them apart, and scan them.  Other publishers, by the way, also do that but with the intention of republishing the books.  At least there’s some form of resurrection there.

Time and again we’re reminded of the mess that’s made when those who have too much money try to run things.  They don’t know the experience of the vast majority of people who either struggle or get by but who do so by dint of being human.  They have determination—which isn’t always rational, but which is a great motivation—to survive (biologically) and thrive.  Some of us have lived our lives for the cause of books.  In desperate days as a younger person I sold rare books I’d obtained to meet current needs.  Some booksellers are noting large, anonymous orders for rare books.  One put a tracker in the package and learned that they were going to Amazon to be destroyed.  The company that once sold us books is now taking them away for good.

Not Full

Leave a comment

Disclosure Day may not be Steven Spielberg’s best movie, but it is a good one.  Part of his space trilogy after Close Encounters and E.T., it too comes back the the theme of aliens and posits what it might be like if those holding the secrets ever release them.  Although not a horror film, it makes use of the Bible—not surprisingly since real-life discussions about disclosure often ask about its effects on religion.  In the movie, the Wardex Corporation, part of the military-industrial complex, is the keeper of the secrets.  They reverse-engineer alien technology, and get to keep what’s found from recovered UAP wrecks.  More powerful than the police, they stop and kill without compunction.  They control the highest level of secrets that the government has—even those beyond the president.  (Spielberg clearly did his homework here, even working in the bit about Jackie Gleason making the claim to have seen alien bodies.)

A couple of Wardex employees, Hugo and Daniel, smuggle out the video proof of the nearly eight-decade cover-up and they plan to release everything to the media.  A weather reporter, Margaret, sudden becomes psychic and receives an alien message while on air.  Wardex has kidnapped and roughed up Daniel’s girlfriend, former novice nun Jane, to force him to return the stolen data.  (Religion plays a big role here.)  Noah, the head of Wardex, uses advanced technology to track Daniel, Jane, and Margaret, as they are trying to meet up.  When Margaret and Daniel finally do connect, Hugo reveals that they’re both “experiencers”—they’d been abducted as children and had been given extraordinary gifts.  Margaret’s abilities are such that she can break into and walk out of a secure military base with Daniel in tow.  As they prepare to show the evidence at Margaret’s Kansas City news station, Wardex shuts them down but Jane delivers a device that allows the broadcast to take place.  The world, which is on the brink of Armageddon—World War Three—stops to listen and begins to realize that we need to work together to save the human race.  

The plot is a bit complex to summarize fully, but this gives the general picture.  Disclosure Day is a hopeful movie.  The theme has been addressed by proponents of real life disclosure before: sharing this kind of information might well save us.  And the religious community, represented by Jane’s former monastery, is perfectly okay with this development.  There’s a lot to say about such a film, and I try to constrain my word counts here.  It’s the kind of movie that grows better with reflection—the writing is a bit trite in places—and the alien tech is a bit hard to believe.  Of course, we don’t know what off-world tech can really do.  But at the end of the day, religion plays a major role in the truth being revealed.  Worth thinking about.

Time and Space

1 Comment

The more things change…  So, there was a major article in TIME titled “There Is a Persistent, Real Presence in Global Airspace beyond Current Human Control and Understanding,” by Jeffrey Kluger.  Now, I’m more of an old crow than a spring chicken, but reading this article reminded me of what I already knew in the seventies.  Even then any reasonably intelligent person could see that the government was covering up UFO sightings.  I mean, they headlined that they found one at Roswell only to retract the story to say that people in charge of nuclear bomb delivery had mistaken a weather balloon for a flying saucer.  Anybody paying attention would’ve noticed that J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer hired to advise the government UFO study program, went from hardened skeptic to true believer.  As I kid I was interested in these things but there was a government-encouraged ridicule response—laugh at the crazies that think there are “little green men.”  The official “scientific” Condon Report was done by scientists who’d decided in advance that it was all malarky.

Then the US Navy finally admitted it was dealing with UFOs—excuse me, UAPs—that it couldn’t explain in 2012.  The New York Times started taking the issue seriously.  Now TIME.  And reading this article, was like a walk down memory lane.  Newer sightings at military bases are now cause for serious study.  Sightings at military bases took place in the seventies, too.  Even as early as the fifties there was a well-known, documented incident where UFOs flew over Washington, DC.  Everyone seems to have forgotten that now.  We’ve had sightings since 2012 and these require explanation!  Those from the previous century—some of which remain unexplained even today—were all seen by nutty people who believe in things like alien abduction.  The current flavor is more for the adult palate.

I’m glad that the question is now out in the open.  I do kind of resent that if you had enough individuality to look at evidence—and yes, there was evidence—you were subject to humiliation.  There are still people laughing.  There are still many who simply don’t believe there’s anything to all this.  But the major media outlets are finally starting to report on it without sniggers behind superior hands.  Laughing at and shunning are two powerful tools of psychological control.  They’ve been in place for decades around Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.  The fact is, no matter what is being hidden the general public will never know the full extent of it.  The current spin of the issue still doesn’t address what many people saw decades ago; we’ve been too busy laughing.  It’s about time to be serious about this, according to TIME.

By the Gods

1 Comment

For three semesters I taught Greek mythology at Montclair State University.  While I’m not a Classics specialist, I still felt the reticence of many Classicists about seeing The Odyssey.  My wife, patient with me as ever, waited until I came around.  I should not have doubted my Penelope, nor should I ever underestimate Christopher Nolan.  The movie surpassed my expectations.  By quite a bit.  Those who complain that it deviates from Homer might consider something I tell those trying to become vegan.  You don’t expect vegan cheese, say, to be exactly like real cheese.  If you accept it for what it is—something to use in place of cheese—you’ll soon acquire a taste for it.  This Odyssey is a movie, not an epic poem written in Greek.  It’s a twenty-first century movie when civilization under Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu seems to be collapsing before our very eyes.  It is a film that offers hope.

Some scenes could’ve fit a horror setting.  When Odysseus’ men were trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, fairly early on, is one of them.  I was vaguely thinking we might watch the movie on some streaming service, but that scene alone requires a theatrical viewing to allow for the full effect.  The scene where they blinded the cyclops was so loud that I couldn’t help but think those in neighboring screenings must’ve been complaining.  There was even another scene where I had a coughing spell but nobody in the theater heard me.  The action and the pacing are about right and even at nearly three hours long, it doesn’t feel overwrought.  I left the theater considering that I had much to think about, even having read the book and having taught the story to undergrads.  It occurred to me just how often we still make reference to the Classics and it is important, especially at times like this, to remember whence we came.

As the credits wound down, still in my seat, I was pleased to see that the movie was shot on film and processed as film.  I still prefer my books on paper, and my music in disc format.  We’ve lost so much to technocrats and their culture of convenience.  I haven’t been to see a movie in a theater for a few years now.  This one reminded me of what I’ve missed.  Even though I knew the story passably well, I found this interpretation of it compelling and new.  A hero who regrets what he did to his fellow people in the name of the gods.  It is appropriate for us to stop and ask ourselves what we have done, and who our gods truly are.

Sleepy Hollow Returns

Leave a comment

Timing has never been my strong suit.  Regular readers may know that the reason I tried to get Sleepy Hollow as American Myth out when I did was that Lindsey Anderson Beer had been announced as the director for a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  I prioritized getting the book done and settled with a publisher.  Still, even in the time it takes to write a book and get it through the production process, the movie was no closer to being seen.  Yesterday while reading a trade news article I learned that Lindsey Anderson Beer has just signed a publisher for her first novel.  Its title?  Hollow.  One guess as to what it’s about.  Beer, of course, is known as the writer/director of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the Stephen King story.  An up-and-coming horror director. I was anticipating that her Sleepy Hollow venture would make a big splash.  And my book would be just out.

Sleepy Hollow is one of those stories that keeps reappearing in American culture.  That’s the point of my book.  Indeed, even as I was attempting, in vain, to get it noticed, I learned that J. W. Ocker was finishing his own book on Sleepy Hollow, due out in September.  And now I learn that the putative director of a new film is writing her own novel.  The story bears repeated retellings.  The way that I characterize it in my book is as a labyrinth.  I have also started my own fictional retelling of the story.  I’ve got a couple novels that I’d like to get out the door before turning back to it, but I certainly understand the draw.  Sleepy Hollow is America’s founding ghost story.  I do hope Beer continues with the movie.  My guess is that it will be based on her own novel, which, naturally, I will read.

We keep coming back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even now, with August awaiting at the end of this week, autumn is swiftly approaching.  And with it rides the Headless Horseman.  As a figure, he’s ubiquitous around Halloween.  I’m already looking forward to next summer when, I hope, McFarland will be willing to drop the price of my book a bit.  I recently had a friend say they were interested in reading it but it was priced a bit too high.  I get that.  I do hope to be part of the conversation as Ocker’s book comes out and then, a year later, Beer’s.  Even if I’m not, this is precisely what my book is about.

Nightmare Talk

Leave a comment

For those inclined to podcasts, and who plan in advance, I wanted to pass along the information on this poster.  James Annitto and Victoria Jaye have kindly invited me to be a guest on their Nine Gates Podcast.  The topic will be Demons in Media.  This is a subject that has interested me for some time since it seems that our current ideas of what demons are owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Exorcist.  Yes, exorcism did exist long before the novel and blockbuster film.  And yes, many of the reported behaviors portrayed therein had been proclaimed by witnesses to said exorcisms—this is what gave William Peter Blatty the idea in the first place.  What had also happened, however, is that public interest in the topic had waned to the point that the novel and movie were so shocking as to jolt the interest back to life.

After The Exorcist, we had a new old monster to add to the horror lexicon.  The Exorcist-styled demon.  It has only grown from there.  A ritual that the Roman Catholic Church had mostly buried became frequently requested.  Protestants, never willing to let Catholics get the upper hand for long, joined in with their own methods of expelling demons.  Popularizers such as Malachi Martin and Ed and Lorraine Warren joined in, asserting demons were not all that uncommon after all.  Those who distrust science now had a new potential source to cure ailments that may have, ironically, been spawned by movies that convinced people that demons did exist.  I dealt with this in my book Nightmares with the Bible.  

I’ve occasionally been invited to various podcasts (a list is here) and I always enjoy it.  It reminds me of being back in the classroom, where I belong.  I realize blogs are outdated, but writing is what I do.  Also, putting together a single podcast can eat up a weekend while a blog post claims much less time.  I like to think I pay back the publicity of my kind hosts by advertising books here.  I have no idea if such notice ever leads anyone to add to any author’s coffers, but I can hope.  Living by the word has never been an easy prospect.  Certainly book royalties (in my experience) don’t come near reimbursing the expenses.  I suppose they’re more legacy building than anything else.  My “Kilroy was here” spray painted on the internet.  In any case, if you’re interested, on a forthcoming Tuesday night, look for me on the Nine Gates Podcast.

250 Years

Leave a comment

America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Remembering Downtown

2 Comments

Monroeville Mall.  Even those who’ve never been to Pittsburgh may recognize it as the site of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  I have to confess that, although living in Pittsburgh for a little while I never got there myself.  It has nevertheless been a pilgrimage site for fans of the movie, but, according to the New York Times, the mall has been purchased by Walmart.  Their plans?  Tear it down.  No empathy.  No sense of decorum.  Just cheap prices and sub-par goods.  I recently had to go to a Walmart.  It had literally been perhaps a decade since I entered one.  I dislike their business practices and they have ruined many a small town downtown area as well as many a mall.  In fact, the one I’d be in prior to this recent trip was the store located in Seneca, Pennsylvania.

Across from that giant Walmart stands the husk of the once trendy Cranberry Mall.  Not far away is the struggling downtown of Oil City.  My aging mother lived in Seneca—had once worked in the mall—but getting down the hill into Oil City was more difficult than nipping over to the super Walmart for groceries or other necessities.  Prices were cheap and she wasn’t flush with cash.    The same applied to many of her neighbors.  Walmart exploits such situations, becoming the only show in town.  Mom and pop stores can’t compete with their prices.  Malls, although many affluent specimens still exist, have struggled in working-class areas.  They served for more than shopping, however.  They were meeting places.  They too contributed to the troubles downtown.

Monroeville Mall never went upscale enough to survive.  Ironically, it was the message that shopping had become a source of meaning that was critiqued by Romero’s movie.  It’s that same corporate greed for more and more market share that will be the eventual death-knell of capitalism.  Any system founded on greed is the same thing as “might makes right.”  We’re seeing that in the politics of our own day.  The paradox of this ouroboros will become clear eventually, if our species survives long enough to observe.  We become attached to places.  While not all movie props can be preserved, we’re compelled toward pilgrimage, and Pittsburgh is the home of the modern zombie.  A message that may not always come through in Dawn of the Dead is that all of us are being made into zombies.  Not by some satellite picking up something in space and then returning to earth, but by good old capitalism.

Rumblings

Leave a comment

Despite the many books on Tambora, it surprisingly gets little press.  Of the volumes on the volcano I’ve read, Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora has been the best.  He, like many others, makes a case for the world-changing impact of that eruption that led to “the year without a summer” in 1816.  Knock-on effects remain with us to this day.  Wood also throws in a good bit of concern about our current climate crisis.  As he points out, the volcanic aerosols of Tambora remained in the stratosphere for three years (leading to three chilly summers), but our current carbon emissions, on-going, have no end in sight.  We all already know that weather has become more extreme.  As I write this, family members in Europe are experiencing 100-degree temperatures that used to be unheard of on that continent.  We’ve seen hurricanes increase in intensity, and have had our own erratic weather for a few years now.  The atmosphere’s too large for us to predict just who might receive the God-like wrath of the weather.

Wood uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both as an illustration of the year without a summer and as the atmospheric monster we’ve created.  He also narrates other historical events brought on by the temporary change in climate in the eighteen-teens.  One of them was the breaking up of Arctic ice that led to the ill-fated Franklin expedition many years later.  (I was unintentionally also reading Dan Simmon’s The Terror even as I read Wood’s chapter about the expedition.)  More than that, this book describes the typhoid outbreak and pandemic that followed on from erratic weather in South Asia.  And deadly changes in parts of China.  The disaster of the breaking of the Giétro glacial ice dam, and an earlier famine in Ireland fueled by British hostility toward the Irish, as well as Tambora’s weather.

The developments that grew out of the human response to the changed climate caused by Tambora led to many institutions still with us.  Governments, slowly, of course, realized that disaster preparedness and care for the working class were necessary for any nation to remain strong.  The privileged lose said privilege when there’s nobody else left to compare it with.  (Capitalism has blood all over its hands.)  Overall, this is a provocative book making the case that the world we recognize today evolved this way largely in response to an environmental crisis that occurred before steam engines had been invented, when sails drove shipping and horses drew vehicles.  When a single volcano changed everything.  And although we should learn from such things, being what we are, we tend to overlook that largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

Freedom

2 Comments

This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

Facing Identity Crisis

Leave a comment

It was one of those periods when time fails to work properly to keep major events spaced out.  We had three major economic events hit us simultaneously and unexpectedly.  Two of them required financing and yet a third involved the government and trying to get our taxes filed.  In any case, I tend to need chronological space to keep these things discrete and make sure I can pay them.  After all of this was done I realized that “secure” information is being collected by all kinds of places these days.  The thing that really got me was that two of them, including the federal government, involved facial recognition software.  In order to confirm my identity I had to hold up my phone and smile pretty for the camera.  Since I can’t speak for the experience of others, I had to wonder if maybe this was because I filed a report of a major scam last year.

I don’t trust AI at all (sorry Al), and governments that collect facial recognition data scare me.  I couldn’t complete my taxes without doing it, though.  A few years ago when I was volunteering for an organization (I can’t recall which one) I had to have my fingerprints put on record.  I thought that was pretty invasive.  I’ve never committed a crime (at least that I’m aware of) and I’ve never been arrested.  Having your fingerprints on record, and your face imprinted in databases certainly makes it feel like it.  Especially since doppelgängers do exist.  On my first visit to Kentucky in the 1980s to help a friend move, the local people all insisted that I was John’s son, a spitting image.  Would Al know the difference?

Once, at Nashotah House, during an accrediting team visit, I was struck by the fact that one of the assessors was a near-perfect doppelgänger of myself.  So much so that when I showed my young daughter a picture I found of him on the nascent web and asked her “Who’s that?” she replied without hesitation “Daddy.”  The facial recognition capacity of kids is pretty keen.  I don’t put a ton of trust in technology.  Of course, the software is probably measuring things like pore depth and nostril hairs.  In neither case did I have the chance to comb my hair and make sure nothing green was stuck in my teeth.  Besides, my face is in a number of spots on this blog.  It doesn’t get as many hits as our finances took in that period when time broke down, but I guess my face is now officially recognized.

Jurassic Horror

Leave a comment

We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

An Education

Leave a comment

The point of education is to improve life for people.  Reading and studying and listening, we learn.  Travel is often an educational experience.  We gain knowledge, but it does no good if we hoard it.  That’s why some become teachers.  In a society that undervalues education, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in.  Just look around you.  The usual path into becoming a teacher is education in education.  You can major in it.  You don’t have to be wise necessarily, since, like all things capitalistic, choice of career is economic.  You pick something for which you feel suited.  If you’re lucky, you get a job doing it.  For “higher education” it’s a bit different.  First of all, you need not study education at all.  You choose a field in which to become a specialist and, if you’re lucky, get a job teaching it.  And those jobs are dependent on, of course, the dismal science.

This is one of the main reasons I write.  When your intention is to be a lifelong learner, you know that if you don’t share what you’ve picked up over the years, it will simply be lost.  As a society, we really don’t encourage sages.  The motivation is to make money, to look out for yourself.  Education becomes a means for self-promotion rather than for sharing what you’ve learned.  In my case, I sometimes feel guilty for writing about horror.  Is it really helping anyone?  I have to believe that it might be.  A certain segment of the population finds horror therapeutic.  Psychologists are starting to explore how it’s actually good for your mentality.  I can only hope that if it means something to me, it will mean something to some others.  And I want to share it.

Religion, at least among the non-cynical, is meant to improve people’s lives.  There is a reason that I wanted to be a religion professor, as I was for a few short years.  My circumstances steered me toward horror as a form of self-care, and I think there’s something much deeper here that has to be mined.  Writing the books I do is more like speculating or prospecting rather than staking a claim and digging tunnels.  If they were causing more harm than good I wouldn’t publish them (or try to).  Life is an educational opportunity.  And if we learn from those who care for other people we might have a chance of improving the lot of many.  Look around you.  Is that where we are today?

Eh Aye Jesus

Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

A Day for Earth

Leave a comment

Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.