Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 155th Edition. AI will kill us all.

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 155th Edition. AI wi...: The Terminator. I don't know if it will, but that's the prediction being made by those working on it. And within ten years. Frankly,...

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 155th Edition. AI will kill us all.

The Terminator.

I don't know if it will, but that's the prediction being made by those working on it.

And within ten years.

Frankly, I think AI is wholly negative and that we'd be better off it it was impossible to develop. But it isn't, and we've never been able to restrain anything we've developed.  What I think the likely consequences are, however, is that it proves so destructive it may end up undoing much of the computer development that's come to date, as a defense to it.

Trump assures us that whatever comes out of it will be "mostly good".

Nothing good will come out of it whatsoever.

Boo

Ted Cruz was so loudly booed that he could hardly be heard in an ESPN interview from Austin.

Cruz deserves to be booed.  He's one of worst examples of Republican toadyism in Congress today.

Big statute

Donald Trump, who was in Ireland when I last checked, has proposed that  a 30-foot “Washington Colossus” be built to replace a modernist sculpture outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.  He's ordering  the institution to put on a Washington exhibition in advance of the late President's 300th birthday.

It's interesting that Trump is interested in Washington.  Washington would not have been keen on Trump.

Trump doesn't like the piece of modernist art that's in front of the Smithsonian.  It doesn't do much for me either, but I don't hate it.  

The odd interesting thing here is that Trump spends so much time messing with the architecture of Washington D. C.  A big statute of George Washington wouldn't necessarily be bad, as long as it wasn't gilded, but Trump's taste in things is generally complete crap.

Trump golfs in Ireland.  M'eh

Classic example of street level Irish speech, which is often really foul.  Posted under fair use exception.

Tá Trump ag imirt gailf in Éirinn. B’fhéidir go mbeidh an t-ádh linn agus go bhfanfaidh sé ann.

An opinion that nobody cares about.

Trump ventured an opinion that Ireland should be united, by which he meant that Northern Ireland should be incorporated into the Irish republic.

That immediately brought rebuke from Na hUltaigh, who didn't appreciate the US President making the comment.  Southern Irish, who have protested his presence in their country, most likely just ignored it.

At any rate, this isn't something that a US President has any business commenting on in the first place.

And, speaking of comments. . .

Open the North Sea

A reporter asked Trump when petroleum prices were going to go down, which was a veiled way to basically saying when is your stupid war going to end, Donald.

Trump replied that oil prices in Ireland would go down as soon as the Irish opened the North Sea.

Wha?

The North Sea is between Great Britain and Scandinavia.

In terms of water depth, while the North Sea is deep, it is shallow enough to be exploited and the seabed is associated with the continental landmass, which is why there are petroleum deposits there.

And the plan is. . .?

FWIW, the North Sea is reaching its terminal production date pretty quick.  Most of the petroleum has already been extracted, at least from the British areas.  BP is pulling out.

On this, it was North Sea petroleum that made Norway rich.  Norway is expanding its production, but the time is coming.

It's coming for Wyoming too.

The plan?

Well, there isn't one. Screaming at the news seems to be the plan.

Shutting down the supply

It's not only the case that King Donald has not managed to restore pre war shipping conditions to the Persian Gulf, over the past week new hazardous conditions were created in Red Sea by the Houthis, Iranian allies and clients, who further caused Saudi Arabia to shut down a transarabian pipeline. All petroleum is back up over $100/bbl.

And in spite of what the Trump administration would have people believe, Venezuelan oil will take at least four years to hit the market in significant quantities to matter, if not ten.

Inflation

Inflation is clearly decelerating even with this slight uptick.

Keven Hassett.

Um. . .okay.

Chickens.

Chuck Gray and Harriet Hageman are refusing to debate their opponents.

That fact alone should mean that they forfeit any votes in the upcoming election.

Their refusal is arrogant at best.

It's noteworthy that neither one of them is any good at debating under stress, and debates this time would be stressful.  Both of them tend to just go hostile when pressed.  

Voters shouldn't let either of them get away with this.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 154th Edition.Trump's approval rating in Wyoming falls from 75% to 54%. Privation. The idiotic "republic not a democracy" line surfaces again. Viking funerals. Miley.

Labels: Athenian Democracy, Democracy, Donald Trump, entertainment, Harriet Hageman, Parliamentary democracy, Republican Party, Tattoos, The Second Trump Administration, Wyoming, Zeitgeist

Lex Anteinternet: National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall

Lex Anteinternet: National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall: When I become President, every golf course in the United States will be grazing land. Same thing with shopping malls. National Park Service ...

National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall

When I become President, every golf course in the United States will be grazing land.

Same thing with shopping malls.

National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall

I know how to play golf, but I don't golf.  It's boring and sanitized.  The kind of sport for people who want to go outside, but fear the outside, or are hopelessly urban.  Granted, that's not the fault of all of the hopelessly urban, and that's the place for golf.

Golf is one of those sports that's underwent an evolution in my mind when I was quite young.  I won't say that is rational or correct. 

My mother was a first rate golfer.  My father didn't golf at all.  None of the men I knew when very young golfed, and when I came to know some that did, as I aged, they were men who didn't do the things, or didn't do them to the same extent, as the men I knew.  Golfing men didn't hunt much, they didn't fish much, they were going to be found at brandings.  They all tended to be from the upper upper middle class, or the lower wealthy.  In my mind, they were effeminized as they were playing what seemed to me to be an effeminate sport.

That view of golf hasn't changed much for me and indeed its been reenforced as I've grown older.  I know that there are some really manly men that golf, but I don't know very many.  Of guy's guys that I know that golf, there's one really nice guy I know who does, and that somehow fits him.  He's a computer guy.  And there's one that's just too out of shape to do anything else, and you can be pretty out of shape and play golf if you use a cart.

I don't think, actually, that these feelings are as unique as a person might think.  At one point in time lawyers were associated with golf (not anymore) and some golfed as they felt they had to.  This was particularly the case with new lawyers.  I've known at least two new lawyers who golfed as they thought that's what lawyers did.  Interestingly, of those two lawyers, I know a third person, a woman, who insists that one is "gay" just by her observations of him, even though he's been a married man for years.  Maybe the golfing was too effeminizing.

In a weird sort of way, Donald Trump emphasized this a couple of years ago when he simply gushed over his probably totally fictional observations of the size of Arnold Palmer's penis.

Seriously?

Oddly enough, golf was definitely associated with lesbianism at one time.  This was the case for decades, and in some ways it cuts against what I'm noting here.  As a sport, it was a sport that women could participate in and do very well as professionals, and so perhaps, maybe, women who were sort of masculine in their internal inclinations participated at a higher rate that would have simply existed in the general population.

I can't say much for golf. 

Golf also seems to me to be the ultimate boring urban upper middle class excuse for a sport, at least at one time.  Manly men might shoot hoops, or go play flag football, or something, but at one time towns and real estate developers but in golf courses as it was the default sport for aging white people.

Tennis is the other urban sport, or was.  It's joined by basketball and pickle ball in that category.  The thing is, however, that to play any of those sports well, you really need to be in shape.  The same kind of guy that can really drive a tennis ball over the net can drive a baseball right down the field at lethal speed..

Supposedly golf has declined in popularity in recent decades, and its notable that at the same time the demographics of the country are changing.  Golf was heavily racist at one time and indeed it was more recently than a person might imagine, although there have been some really notable Hispanic and Black golfers.  Golf is apparently of Scottish origin, where it would have been pretty darned manly, so its an import of the British Isles.  People from other cultures don't really have any roots in it, and for that matter, lots of European Americans don't.  Shooting was the sport for Germans, and competitive shooting, like polo, was a major military sport.  Shooting was, and in fact is, a major civilian sport in many parts of the country.  Basketball is an American sport, as is baseball, and both were played by rural and lower middle class demographics at first.  Basketball is particularly interesting this way as it comes from farming country with bitter winters, so its a good indoor sport for a lot of pretty athletic people.

Football is actually of British origin, but the origin is from the British lower class and it reflects that origin to this day.  Hunting is a male human universal, which recent anthropology suggest had more female participation in antiquity than previously imagined.

Gardening, hunting, shooting, walking, running and nearly anything just seems to have more merit that golf.  But it hangs on in the minds of the elderly, a game of privilege from their youth.

So that a bloated old man with money would choose to wreck things for golf, makes sense.  People tend to hang on to the era in which they were young, and the wealthy have more of an ability to do that than other people.  The super wealthy have the ability to afflict that on everyone else.