Dilbert: a contrived controversy…

The author of the comic strip Dilbert, Scott Adams, must have made enough money that he wanted to retire from the daily pressure of producing funny comic panels each day.

At the same time, a right-leaning polling outfit, that is Rasmussen, reportedly put out an asinine, ambiguous question or statement that by its very nature or wording promised to produce results to create controversy and widen the rift between races.

It asked respondents: “is it OK to be white?” or, to be more precise, they were asked to respond to the lack-of-context statement: “it’s ok to be white”.

Now I think the statement cannot elicit a meaningful response since I don’t know what it means. Ok, how?

I suppose, though, one might infer that to some it might be a sarcastic jab at political correctness and the so-called woke movement. To others, say some black people, it might provide an opportunity to register grievances with the white race, whose maltreatment they have historically received..

Thoughtful people from any background would do well to pass up the opportunity to respond to what amounts to a loaded question. I don’t think one could respond to the statement correctly or civilly.

I have only viewed the Dilbert cartoons with the famous office cubicle-bound charicature and his curled-up tie sporadically over the years. I found them amusing. I think the overall statement implicit in them was that cubicle work is drudgery and the goal is to maintain one’s own level of incompetence.

But, apparently, in recent times some of his his cartoons had taken on a more political bent, taking satirical jabs at equal opportunity and token hiring quotas and the gender neutral movement.

I didn’t go into, yet, what Adam’s reportedly said in a podcast. Did not hear it. But supposedly, reacting to the Rasmussen poll, he claimed the numbers showed blacks as a hate group and advised whites to avoid them.

Was he being sarcastic? Is there more context? Kind of hard to figure.

Hundreds of newspapers have dropped him, well so has the syndicate that published his work. But you have to realize only a handful of chains own the newspapers, so it’s not hundreds of individual publishers dropping Dilbert.

What I get out of this is that much of the polling and the hype that goes with it is counter productive to objective reasoning.

Polls are often not legitimate, due to the real intent of the pollsters, the way questions are asked, sampling numbers and methods, and who answers them.

And cancel culture is bad enough, but perhaps as others have suggested, Adam’s cancelled himself.

He may have had more of a point. He may have been trying to engage in some satire, but the evidence seems missing.

Darn! No more Dilbet?

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I left out the reported results of the Rasmussen poll in question. It’s only a  click away. One commentator was dubious as to whether there even was a poll.

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U.S./Mexico border crisis? Neither Republicans nor Dems want to fix it — too much cheap labor, potential votes…

Certainly one way to deal with the surge of illegal crossings into the U.S. on the Mexican border is stepped-up enforcement.

By the way, why is illegal immigration a problem?

Answer: it’s humanitarian resources expended and their attendant costs, plus the crime that seems to float in on the waves of illegal entries. The good folks offer unwitting or involuntary cover for the bad actors.

So how is enforcement lacking?

For one, I see an awful lot of border patrol and immigration agency vehicles congregated at checkpoints miles north of the border. Why not spread out closer to the line?

Surveillance along the thousands of miles of no-man’s land with its deserts and mountains is a problem. Maybe we need to borrow some of that Chinese balloon technology. We just recovered some.

I doubt a massive wall or walls is the most efficacious method, but it would be wise to maintain our various existing barriers (the patchwork of walls and fences).

Experience in the present and over the ages demonstrates that determined border crossers or invaders seem to always manage to get over or around or through barriers.

One of the biggest draws of illegals is employment. So if laws against hiring those not entitled to work here were more broadly enforced it would seem that would go a long ways toward dealing positively with the problem.

The New York Times has done a revealing investigative piece in which it found that there were large numbers of under-age minors, who entered from the southern border, working in U.S. factories, meat packing plants, construction, and other jobs. Many get injured on these jobs. Large numbers of these minors came over the border unaccompanied. In some cases they are harbored by family members but they also are often treated as virtual slave laborers by their hosts, having to pay for their board and send remittances back home.

The shocking, or perhaps not so surprising thing, is that our government is fully aware of all this.

I have to suspect it is a combination of lack of manpower and political pressure from those who take advantage of the vulnerable labor supply, often Republicans, to not rock the boat. And the Democratic Party bends to special immigration interests and has the expectation of expanding its voter rolls.

Employers will complain that they just can’t find workers to fill their jobs. To some extent, no doubt true. But the ethical answer is to do what can be done to improve safety and to provide better wages, rather than depending upon the vulnerable and government subsidies by way of medical and other care offered to even illegals. Many of them attend our schools. Employers often decry government subsidy for workers but not themselves.

We should do our best to stop the draw of illegals over our border. But at the same time we need to have humanitarian ways of dealing with helpless people already here.

And, of course, that’s the rub. We have thousands who have been detained but then released to wait for a court date. Some just melt into the population, never to be heard from again.

Obviously, the process needs to be streamlined.

And then there is the irony of people who discover that they are not U.S. citizens only after years into their adulthood. Just read that a man who spent decades as an immigration officer deporting others found out he was actually born in Mexico, as were his parents. Now he’s out of a job and fighting extradition in the courts. Interestingly, he reportedly is living off of some type of government disability payments. I would hope his case would be resolved in his favor.

I have sympathy for all snared in this trap.

You don’t have to come from south of the border to get the rude surprise. I knew a woman who years ago applied for a passport assuming she was a U.S. citizen. I forget the details, but her family history was not from south of the border. She discovered that the parent whom she thought was born here was born in a border area, but inside Canada. Somehow it was all resolved.

Anyway, to my way of thinking, we need to step up enforcement and stop the draw of illegal entry.

In a perfect world with unlimited resources we could welcome all, except criminals. But we have immigration requirements for a purpose.

Back to the hiring. Sorry, but I don’t get why when I applied for a job with my current employer years ago that I was required to show proof of citizenship or legal permission to work in this country. Why? If illegals are hired by the millions, what gives? I think employers who knowingly hire illegals should be heavily sanctioned. I know that happens, but apparently not enough. Don’t know, really, if the sanctions are at a level that is actually a deterrent.

Often a computer system called e-verify is touted as a way to prevent illegal hiring, but I read it has holes; both employers and prospective employees know how to get around it (kind of like that border wall or fence).

Well, always some people will break the law but that should not stop continued spot enforcement, on employers big and small, from home owners to meat packers.

And back to border walls. I’m not enamored of them. Partly, it’s the aesthetics. Makes us look too much like the old East Germany and its Berlin Wall (although in our case we’re trying to keep people out rather than imprison them). It just seems so downright rude.

Also, barriers prevent the free movement of wild animals, who make up God’s complex ecosystem upon which all life, including humans, depends.

The Biden administration appears to be concentrating more on the asylum question — individuals and families fleeing danger and persecution. At the same time it is trying to get the assistance of private enterprise to improve conditions in some of the countries in Latin America from which people are fleeing. Long range, perhaps that could help.

However, it was recently announced that the Biden administration will allow thousands of immigrants in from the Caribbean and Latin America, giving them special work permits.

Gee, just grant them to all at the border, then.

Some claim there is currently a shortage of labor in the U.S. It may depend upon which sector one is speaking of. I, for one, am dubious.

Good pay and good working conditions go a long ways. For the jobs where that does not work…yes, they may disappear.

Ok, enforcement of existing rules is not perfect but it is something to consider.

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That’s why we need more moderates in politics who have no dog in the hunt, but instead want to solve problems.

I’m not against new immigrants nor asylum seekers. But I think the system needs to be fair and workable, and streamlined.

Artificial intelligence is getting too scary…

I should do more research before I write anything about artificial intelligence or AI, but hearing today that one former Google software engineer believes there is AI now that is “sentient”, that is it has emotions, I just had to comment.

My first thought: that’s scary.

My second thought: that’s real scary.

Puts me in mind of that science fiction movie years ago where a computer system turned on its operator and engaged in nuclear blackmail that threatened dooms day. As I recall, the operator thought he’d just pull its plug, but the computer was interconnected in some fail-safe manner that such would not stop it, or at least that was its design

In the end, the human prevailed, just in the nick of time.

But this is no longer science fiction.

Oh, that Google software engineer was fired over his statement about an AI program really thinking and emoting, or at least signaling some human-like emotion. But he’s sticking to his guns and hopes to be remembered as being the first to discover an AI program is actually sentient.

He thinks we need to have safeguards but that the new AI will not replace jobs as much as change the nature of them.

A radio host that was interviewing him commented that some college professors were in hot water for sending a letter to their students that was at least partially written by an AI program.

Why would educated people be at a loss for words?

As far back as forty years ago there was some type of AI that supposedly composed something passed off as prose.

Totally unrelated, in that same time frame, while working as a newspaper reporter I interviewed a woman who wrote romance novels . She told me that they were not literary gems or masterpieces but rather stories penned to fit a formula the publisher required.

I imagine she enjoyed writing them and enjoyed the money she made from them, that her readers enjoyed reading them, and the publisher enjoyed selling them.

That’s all nice, but that is not true human expression and the sharing of it.

Why should we want to dehumanize our world?

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I’m already tired of wading through the electronic answering program when I call something like my doctor’s office and a voice repeatedly directs me to push one number on my phone and then another and another. I also am annoyed when I am advised to listen closely as our menu has changed. I’ve been wasting my time listening for years and, no, the same old time-eating menu.

The best description of AI, though, is the commercial in which a guy wants an emergency appliance repair and when he realizes he’s talking to a robot and that the robot can’t help him he asks if he can talk to a real person. “Nope”, answers the robot.

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Some links for background:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/?amp=true#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16772130922076&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com

https://www.podcastguide.us/podcasts/The-Smerconish-Podcast/episode/120175/

We’re too busy working to keep tabs on local politics, but special interests and reactionaries aren’t…

Don’t tell me I can’t have and carry a gun, and anywhere I want, and for all to see. And don’t tell me I gotta mask up because there’s a pandemic and some fancy-pants doctor says it might cut the spread of the virus that’s killing millions.

That seems to be the attitude of what appears to me as a large or at least vocal and belligerent segment of today’s American society.

I’m just as much for personal freedom as any MAGA person, radical righter, self-proclaimed patriot or whatever, but at some point we have to agree on rules. And each one of us can’t simply decide on our own how to interpret what the rules actually say. If every individual simply goes his or her own way we have chaos, anarchy, not civilization.

Not even local elected officials should have power to ignore rules at their whim or in order to circumvent duly-adopted laws and regulations of the state and federal governments to push their own ideology.

In the county in which I reside the local governing body, known as the Board of Supervisors, through its MAGA majority, has done its utmost to pressure appointed officials and employees to ignore state and federal law or authority. The board’s majority fired the doctor that was the county’s health director, apparently because some people objected to her enforcement of state Covid-19 health and vaccination requirements. In her own defense she claimed she was not any more strict than regulations called for.

She had reportedly received death threats over the issue. The county is searching for a replacement. Who’d want the job?

Since these things are hidden from the rest of us in closed session, we can’t get a clear picture as to reasoning or justification of the dismissal.

The board majority was considering passing a local ordinance that would direct local public employees not to enforce state or federal gun laws. One of the board members (supervisor), the one introducing the measure, owns a gun shop.

(At last report that move failed, but it’ll likely resurface in some form.)

Our MAGA majority distinguished itself recently no doubt in Trump world or among the election-denier crowd by dropping the MAGA-maligned Dominion computerized voting system, making Shasta the first among 40 California counties using it to do so. (The county itself estimates it’ll cost one million dollars to replace it). You’ll recall the Trumpistas claimed without producing hard evidence that Dominion somehow was used to falsify vote counts, thus in part, leading to Trump’s election loss. Courts up and down the line, including Trump’s own hand-picked majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, refused to buy the baseless voting challenges.

(Dominion is suing its detractors for what it maintains are false claims. Personally, I’d prefer ballots be hand counted the old fashioned way. But blaming an election loss on Dominion or wasting money on trashing a system without hard evidence and just heresay is crazy.)

I don’t know any of these elected officials, true. And I spend most of my time away from home. Although I vote, most of my concentration is on state and national politics. At 73, I’ve spent forty or more years in the county where I now reside. Before that I worked as a newspaper reporter in the county just south of my present home. I covered the local board there. Now those folks were conservative. The big beef then, and likely still, was that the state mandated local governments do various and sundry things, and at specified staff levels, but provided no funding. They complained mightily, but to little avail. Today’s crowd would maybe just rebel and refuse to follow the law.

Depending on the issue, that’s pretty enticing. And there is such a thing as standing on principle.

But local governing boards in our system are limited to directing policy within their authority. They certainly should not put hired public servants or employees on the spot for obeying the law and fearing being reprimanded or fired just to push the ideology or special interests from a local official or political faction.

We need competence, level-headedness, and stability in local government, as well as at the higher levels. Reactionaries from the right (or radicals on the left) we don’t need.

The problem or dilemma: most of us are too busy working to attend public meetings or keep up on local issues. But those with special intetests or nothing better to do seem to have time.

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At one time we had a local newspaper that kept tabs on local government, but revenue woes have nearly decimated it. I do my best. I subscribe to its digital edition. But it seems woefully understaffed. The current conglomerate that owns it has let it wither on the vine.

Running a quality local newspaper takes a certain type of capitalist or capitalism that goes beyond necessary profit and takes in civic duty, pride, and outright altruism.

Not a lot of that available today.

Only Ukraine and Europe can or should save Ukraine; we can –are– helping, of course…

President Biden made a surprise visit to embattled Ukraine over the past many hours, promising continued support for that fledgling democracy’s battle with the Russian invaders, which includes several more million dollars of our tax money.

As the war in Ukraine reaches the one-year mark, the U.S. has sent Ukraine some $50 billion in aid to back its defense.

This week, Biden announced another $460 million. This is getting expensive.

U.S. financial woes in the 1970s were to a large extent the result of the debt from borrowed money to pay for the Vietnam War. Politicians then and today are afraid to raise taxes to pay for war.

Yes, the current war in Ukraine is a fight for democracy against autocracy or the forces against democracy.

It’s important not only for Ukraine but all of Europe, and over the long run, all the democracies of the world, including the United States.

BUT, it should be up to Ukraine and its European allies to do the heavy lifting and, I hate to say it, the bloody part.

Ukrainians are. They seem a model for dedicated fighters for freedom.

But what about the Germans or the French?

Western Europe lived for decades after World War II under the protective umbrella of the United States. Shorting its fair-share contributions to collective defense through NATO, it was able to flourish economically while at times chiding the U.S. for its debacle in Vietnam. France even partially withdrew from NATO for a time.

The one thing President Trump might have had right was his criticism that NATO countries were not contributing enough of their GDP for Europe’s defense (being correct once, a leader does not make).

Nonetheless, unconditional victory against the Russian aggressor would be preferable for the survival of world democracy. The forces opposing democracy are looking on curiously with much anticipation no doubt.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), something tells me the end result in this first all-out conventional land war (with some new unconventional weapons) since WWII, will be some type of negotiated settlement, ceding some territory to Russia.

With the continued stalemate and losses of life and destruction, it all seems either hopeless or senseless or both

However, a united Europe and a valiant Ukraine just might stop the Russian bear.

The oligarchs and others who support Putin might turn on him.

I don’t see the United States public as a whole ever entertaining drafting young people to go over there.

Seems doubtful the public would even support sending our all-volunteer military either.

In recent years, the U.S. has recorded a poor track record in military resolve.

Politicians seem to have this fantasy that wars can be half fought and financed by budgetary trickery.

But the result is more soldiers die, still, victory is not achieved, and the bills pile up.

If Ukraine were a NATO member (as it wants to be) we’d be obligated to more directly join in the war. I write ” more directly” because our heavy backing of Ukraine already is pretty direct.

It almost seems we’re already into it now.

We may have wandered into World War III and just don’t realize it yet.

Whether it’s outright lies from Fox or more subtle bias by CNN, truth and democracy suffers…

Thanks to evidence in an ongoing court case we now have proof of what most anyone who pays attention knew all along, the talking heads at Fox News don’t even believe the propaganda they spread under the guise of news or factual reporting.

(Link to court case info at bottom)

Internal emails clearly demonstrate that they simply give their favored demographic of blind followers of Trump and his cynical sycophants what they want to hear in order to keep their ratings and the advertising money they generate coming in.

Now one might be tempted to accuse other so-called news outlets, such as CNN, of doing the same, except for or with a different clientele. But the evidence is not there for all to see (which does not mean there isn’t any). But the lies or twisting of or disregard for the truth are so blatant at Fox.

The culprits are greed for dollars and disregard for ethics and the unholy blend of news and opinion and outright propaganda.

Journalism has always had its problems. It has always had its bad actors, but it all went to hell when broadcast news, primarily television, discovered that rather than just something required as a civic duty that lost revenue, news could be basically an entertainment commodity of sorts.

At first it seemed rather harmless and even valuable for democracy. You had celebrity stories, some gossip, but too, you had some hard-hitting investigative pieces that brought out important issues in public life, revelations of corruption, civil rights violations, and the dangerous pollution of our eco-system and planet.

But soon celebrity became more important. The journalists themselves morphed into entertainers, at times overshdowing the stories they told.

And to satisfy the market, objectivity took a secondary role or was discarded altogether.

Straight newscasting has taken a backseat to the presentation of ideology-driven presentations of the issues of the day.

Much of all of this now is presented in digital form, primarily on our phones.We have generations now raised entirely on digital information.

Newspaper and book editors as responsible gatekeepers of information are overpowered by the plethora of data, much un fact checked, bombarding the public, from small children to adults.

Adolph Hitler, who spewed hate, attempted to take over the world, and directed the outright murder of millions, knew that if you told lies to people wanting to hear them because they validated their own prejudices and fears, those lies were treated as truth among the faithful and gullible. And that is power.

Democracy and individual freedom depend upon the availability of factual information, as opposed to one-sided propaganda controlled by the government or one political faction.

My take is that the Fox News type of slanted reporting is what led to the Jan. 6 attack on our democracy.

Any slant that comes from the likes of CNN can in the long run have its own bad consequences, but the damage is more subtle or gradual generally.

I see one part of the news media presenting outright lies or distortions and the other framing things in some kind of more or less narrow-minded group-think progressivism.

The one side generates violent attacks, the other stifles objectivity in favor of so-called enlightened progressive thought and policy.

We just need clear lines between actual objective reporting of events and public issues and opinion or sales pitches for public policies and less or actually no worthless and harmful propaganda — although the bad stuff is for the most part protected by the First  Amendment, at least till it reaches the threshold of malicious libel and slander, primarily determined by case law through our judicial system.

But none of this can be resolved under law.

It all has to be a desire by responsible and engaged citizens as consumers of news.

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For national and world news I listen primarily the CNN and read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal digital editions, the latter I have paid subscriptions to, the former comes over my sattelite radio, for which I also pay. From time to time I check out Fox to see what the so-called anti-establishment spin is (there is no precise identifying term). I think possibly in its straight news reports on the hour, Fox may do a credible job (not sure), but like CNN and others most of the time is taken up by programs that don’t self-identify as presentations of opinions but rather discussions of the issues of the day. For Fox, the modus operandi is to just frame everything the opposite of its CNN-type competitors, which it labels the “mainstream” or, in mocking fashion, the “lamestream” media. The word “media” itself has for the most part replaced the outdated term of “press”, due to fewer and fewer printing presses.

But am I wrong that there was a time in my younger years when credible newspapers ran objective, balanced news stories on the front page and others and saved the opinion pieces for clearly-marked Editorial or Opinion pages, and where even on those, differing sides to issues were presented? To some extent that still exists I think. But the new modern style has gone back to the future, like in the colonial days when the forebearers of modern newspapers were essentilly essays with a point of view. The idea or method of sending dispatches with news from a distance came about with the advent of the telegraph where correspondents sent in reports on Civil War battles. One did not know when the line might be cut off, so it was necessary for these reports to be concise with the most important points up front and everything else in descending order, the so-called inverted pyramid style.

And just what is the ideology of Fox and its like? We sometimes call it far right or conservative. But the old champions of conservatism or the right, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (a liberal turned conservative), would be booted out of Trump world. Surviving members of the Republican Party conservative establishment have for the most part been emasculated or relegated to the dust bin. We can only hope they get their mojo back.

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I offer a couple of I think credible news sources:

BBC, from our mother country, which reveals there is world out there beyond the United States and even Great Britain, and the Spanish newspaper El País, that does not confine all its news to Spain or even the Latin world. And, if you don’t speak Spanish, or only at a low level as I, the app has a translator (but at times it’s awkward, especially when it comes to pronouns). There is also an El País in English edition.

If you are like me, you look for truth and new information (and entertainment) not just something to complement or bolster or validate what you already think.

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About the libel case mentioned above:

Five top revelations from Dominion’s explosive court filing in Fox News lawsuit

Now we’re shooting down UFOs…

UPDATE: 2/13/23: U.S. government officials are saying we are being presented with objects entering our airspace and Canada’s (three so far) that are so far unknown as to type and origin. In conjunction with Canada, the three were shot down under the reasoning they posed a safety threat to aviation. These objects are in addition to the Chinese balloon that was shot down.

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If we are to believe our own government, not only are we being spied upon by Chinese balloons and satellites but maybe threatened somehow by unidentified (as of yet) flying objects.

And while a giant Chinese balloon was allowed to cross our nation coast to coast, hovering over defense installations on the way, before being shot down by our jets once over the Atlantic, we’ve let other unidentified craft fly over for years unobstructed, either because we were not immediately aware of them or, who knows why? This going back as far as Trump, but perhaps decades.

Maybe that whole Roswell, New Mexico thing in 1947 was some type of spy mission. By who? Martians?

And over the years, including in present or recent times, both commercial and military pilots have reported sightings of craft making super-fast and seemingly impossible maneuvers. After playing down such things over the years, our government has acknowledged the existence of UFOs. Of course a new bureaucratic-speak name was concocted: UAPs: Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. But a UFO is a UFO by any other name.

There could be legitimate reasons for withholding public info on some of this, maybe. But one has to wonder: just what do we know?

With China and Russia ahead of the U.S . in hypersonic missile technology and North Korea able to target the U.S . , to a degree, with missiles, we are in a precarious situation.

Since that big balloon flap this past week or two, we’ve taken to shooting down UFOs, you know, those things we were told were figments of our imagination, swamp gas. At last count, three, over either U.S. or Canadian air space. No identification on them at last report.

At times like this, we need responsible people in charge. I know President Joe Biden is responsible, if a little old.

But whatever, we need level-headed people at the top.

It seems we are being tested, maybe distracted or misdirected.

Our military is on the line here. Is the brass really up to it? Or have they gotten too comfy in their offices?

What was the nonsensical bureaucratic phrase used to admit ignorance of all the possible overflights? An “awareness gap”.

How do they know they didn’t know?

Something about maybe radar picked up some signals that had appeared as innocuous. But looking back…

What is our intelligence apparatus up to?

I know. It’s a secret.

President Biden needs a capable understudy…

The old man did good at his state of the union speech, maybe demonstrating he’s up to running for re-election in 2024, despite his advanced age. But with his advanced age, President Joe Biden, who turns 81 this year,  needs an understudy. It’s hard to visualize that Vice President Kamala Harris is up to it.

It’s hard to imagine Harris being a successful president of a local PTA chapter, let alone the United States.

Then again, I thought Biden was a gaffe-prone third-rater before he became president.

Maybe I’m misjudging Harris. But she certainly has done nothing to inspire confidence. She has a history of chaos and dissatisfaction within her staffs in campaign and political office.

I’m thinking Harris should have stayed in the senate and built up her résumé there. In fact, the senate, perhaps, should have or could reasonably been her ultimate goal.

Biden I would think is hard pressed to drop her, unless she voluntarily ducked out. He might kick her upstairs to the Supreme Court, if a new vacancy arose; that’s been suggested.

He might give her an important task in which she can demonstrate her mettle. But he did hand her the hot potato of immigration and border protection…how’d that work out? Not so well, at last glance.

If the Republicans can’t shake the neo nazism that is MAGA or Trumpism, Biden might not need to worry.

The Harris political history is that thanks to her association to political wizard Willie Brown she raced through the ranks of a local DA, California Attorney General, and U.S. senator. Her luck, she connected to the Biden family and was rescued from a flop as a presidential candidate and made vice president. And that, even after insulting Biden in a debate with a cheap shot about school busing.

Maybe she really does know what she’s doing. If Biden were re-elected, and with his age into a second term, 83, the odds of her becoming president increase dramatically.

I for one would like to see Harris be given more of a chance to demonstrate her abilities or for her to decide on her own that she wants more family time.

I’d also like to see the Republicans go back to the future with the GOP old guard, that is old as in traditional, not necessaily age.

Chinese may be testing us, we need to keep up a dialogue, even so…

So, along with the celebration of the Chinese New Year we have the great Chinese-balloon-over-the-USA story.

What is it that they say about the Chinese? Very inscrutable. I mean why would they send a giant and quite visible lighter-than-airship over us on what so obviously appears as a spy mission and not just a weather balloon?

Some suggest it was to test our nerve or resolve. Back in the time of Mao, the communist Chinese taunted us or tried to shame us by calling the USA a ” paper tiger”.

I for one am not impressed, at first glance, with our reaction, that is waiting till it completely crossed over the U.S., coast to coast, then shooting it down once over the Atlantic. I would presume it had sent all its data back to Beijing by then, after hovering over several of our military installations, including ICBM silos.

The given reason was bringing it down over land might have endangered our population.

I’m wondering why it was even allowed to enter our airspace on the West Coast, up around Alaska I believe.

What if the balloon was carrying a nuclear bomb?

Our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, canceled a previously-scheduled visit to China over the incident.

Given the circumstances, he really had little choice, maybe. But now we need to continue to have a dialogue with China. It has become our number-one competitor in the world, economically and militarily.

We may not know what the Chinese were thinking, but we know the threat the Russians pose. With his ruthless, inhuman invasion of Ukraine and his threats to use nuclear weapons, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has made reasoning with him all but impossible, it seems. We may be able to negotiate with the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, inserting ourselves between China and Russia, as we tried to do in the later stages of the Cold War, which seems to have re-emerged.

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What if it was just a weather balloon? Probably 0 chances.

The Chinese weren’t all that original in their claim it was a weather balloon. President Eisenhower tried that lame excuse in 1960 when the Russians shot down our U-2 spy plane over their territory, that is we were just gathering weather data. Then after the Russians proved otherwise, with egg on his face, Ike had to confess. Soviet leader Nikita Kruhschev used that as an excuse to walk out of the summit meeting in Paris between the then two world superpowers.

Eisenhower would have done better to shrug his shoulders and comment: so you caught us, next time we’ll catch you, now let’s talk.

Hopefully we can come to such an understanding with the Chinese.

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There are reports of another balloon or balloons over Latin America, with the Chinese maintaining the weather data gathering story. And after this most current and visible event in the U.S., the Defense Department says there is a history of the Chinese sending balloons our way. Thanks for telling us, now.

UPDATE: The latest from the Pentagon is that previous flights, including ones during the Trump administration, went unreported for what they were because they were classified as UFOs.

Furthermore, they somehow know now what they didn’t know they didn’t know back then.

Homelessness is an irritating phenomenon now, it may be our way of life when we all have been invented out of a job…

Note: Ok folks, I got a little carried away here and practically penned a tome. I generalized and rather than a lot of research and statistics, I just went mostly by 73 years of observation of life around me.

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I just read that there are fewer homeless people in the United States today than a decade ago — you could not prove that by me. I’m not going to get lost or fooled by statistics. I travel up and down the west coast states and into Nevada and Arizona in my job. Been at it for more than two decades. Homelessness gets more noticeable each year.

Hopefully most who might read this are fairly protected from being pushed out into the elements, but don’t get too smug if you’re still in the work world — whether you are considered blue or white collar (old fashioned terms), automation is after your job.

Our society has gone through a drastic change since I was a little boy. I was born in 1949. We of course had homeless people then, but I guess for the most part they were hidden away. And many who are homeless today back then might have worked at menial low-paid jobs that might have afforded them some shelter above a cardboard box, maybe a converted chicken coop.

Oh yeah, any town of any size had a skid row where the winos hung out. Sacramento chased out the winos or took over their turf and turned its skidrow into a tourist attraction called Old Sacramento. Marysville, Ca, a town of which I used to live across the river from, had its D St. where aimless old men hung out. A guy from the other side of the river in Yuba City by the name of Juan Corona picked up these old hopeless white guys for farm labor in the orchards, killed them when it came pay day and buried them among the trees.

Many or most of the old skid rows are gone — the down and out are spread around.

Back in the day, there were vagrancy laws. The cops might pick a homeless person up and take him to the county work farm or let him out at the edge of town. These days the towns out of state give them a bus ticket to Redding, Ca. where I live. At least that’s the common accusation around here (Redding). An urban myth?

I think the homeless communities everywhere in this day and age are more diverse, maybe more females than in times past. Hey it’s an equal opportunity world now.

Before some of the LBJ-introduced welfare programs some people worked as near or virtual slaves for employers who took advantage of their circumstances or seeing it another way provided poor people with a lifeline.

And I’m not talking about just minorities but poor white folks.

The Great Society programs originally introduced by LBJ did a lot of good. But, over the years they may not all have received enough continued funding.

In addition, some folks might have gotten too accustomed to them, passing down a lifestyle to future generations.

The upheaval of the Vietnam War and the emergence of the drug culture took its toll on a society that had been more structured.

(I realize thousands simply did their duty and fought the war and were proud to serve their country. We lost nearly 50,000 of our military or thousands more considering life debilitating injuries ).

Families tended to stay together, young men either followed in their father’s footsteps and took their place at the factory or trade or the farm or went to college and into a profession. Women became mothers but also began to venture into the work outside the home world, and probably doubling as household caregiver.

But politics aside, belief in country and a sense of civic duty prevailed (a generalization sure).

The Vietnam War changed all that. It became apparent that young men were being forced to put their own lives on the line for questionable reasons, geopolitics not directly connected to defense of our nation, an intervention into the internal affairs of another nation.

The distrust in a government that had lied about what was really taking place in Vietnam spawned a whole new movement of rebellion against the status quo.

Many decided it was not in their interest to fight half way across the world in a dispute  that had no direct connection to their home. It was futile to get in the middle of a fight between factions of a foreign society.

At the same time that rebellion I think caused women to question their heretofore pre-ordained role in society as servants.

Questioning the status quo was good, but a side effect was the tune-out drug culture.

But now, I’ll step back a bit farther:

In my dad’s time, the time of his youth (early 20th Century), that is, the homeless were primarily colorful, itinerant working men and just plain hobos.

Some were not only colorful but a little smelly. He always told of one, “Kurtz”, I think they called him, who would visit his family’s farm and do a little work, as little as possible, for a meal and a bed. You could smell him coming a mile away.

Another such vagabond, perhaps a tad more help, said he left his wife in Missouri over marital difficulties and set out walking along the railroad tracks. He got hungry, spied a rooster from someone’s yard and threw a rock at it, thus securing his dinner.

This was well before the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Depression put thousands of people, including whole families, out of their homes. But unlike today, many displaced families had a safety net of sorts. They moved in with other family members or relatives down on the farm. It had only been in the just preceeding decades, especially the 1920s, that there had been a large migration from the farms into the urban areas

But those who had no such refuge occupied any shelter they could find or create, from boxes to tents to abandoned homes and buildings. My mother remembers seeing that.

Of course there was the great migration from the midwest Dust Bowl to California. At first many encountered hardship, but much of the succeeding generations prospered.

So what I have described so far is: homelessness by choice and homelessness by economic downturn (and weather calamity…hmmm, that could happen now)..

But today we have an ever-growing homeless population (at least it seems so by observation). They camp out on any piece of ground they can find, often on little strips amid the freeways and off and on ramps and overpasses and such. They strew litter all over.

There are also people living in cars and campers, parked anywhere they can.

While most of the homeless I see not in the vehicles don’t appear to be families, definitely there are families in vehicles, mostly run down, shabby vehicles parked illegally.

I lifted the following paragraph from a New York Times story (by Kevin Draper) that sets the scene:

——- At least eight times in 2016 and 2017, the police in Overland Park, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, had contact with Babudar. In most cases he was in a parked car with his mother and brother late at night, and a business owner found their presence suspicious. Other times they were using a hotel lobby or pool even though they were not staying at the hotel.  —–

Homelessness is a health and quality of life problem for those who suffer it as well as the populace at large.

It’s shameful that we let or leave folks to live this way, and it’s a major blight on our communities.

It seems an intractable problem, although I’m not sure it has to be. It’s just that there seems little will among either the general public or our leaders to address it.

No one wants to pay the bill. And by outward appearance much of the homeless seem unemployable.

Working as a newspaper reporter years ago, I did a story on a government-funded job training program. I got the impression that several of those who signed up were just going through the drill. One lady commented something to the effect, oh, yeah, we did this a few years ago. What happened? One wonders. Now that I think, that should have been the story.

I don’t pretend to know all the causes or the roots of the homeless situation. I assume by my own observations it’s many fold.

Certainly drug and alcohol abuse account for much of it, along with mental health issues, some related to the former.

The advance of technology has eliminated large avenues employment among the lower levels of society and is now threatening upper levels, especially with artificial intelligence.

In addition, menial work that sustained lower echelons has been relegated to immigrants legal and not.

And please don’t think of me as preachy or outdated here, but for my money I blame the movement away from the nuclear family, i.e., mom, dad, children living together, for much of it.

Yeah, things aren’t like they used to be…they never were, I add sardonically. But we had a model for stability and support that did not depend upon large government social subsidies or supports, although we found safety nets necessary, particularly after the Great Depression and later in the 1960s in the times of LBJ.

Due to personal desires, circumstances, and the realities of the modern age, people will live as they live, but I will never let go of the  belief in self sufficiency and family stability

Recognized religions support this,  but the model of the nuclear family does not depend upon religion. And a stable family does not have to precisely fit the model to have a positive effect.

BUT NOW, since beginning this little essay, I have read up (well one story) about ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

It’s a new form of artificial intelligence (AI) that, if I’m describing it correctly, can take your questions and spit back your answers in human-like text instead of just using keywords that may not even be relevant. In other words, in some sense it mimics human thinking and creativity. It can write simple poems and stories. Some forms of AI can even generate art work. It still has limitations but AI is moving ahead exponentially these days.

Heretofore, mostly manual labor or blue collar type jobs faced the biggest threat from technology. Or, so too clerical  — the boss does not necessarily need a secretary to type a letter, with the advent of word processing.

But now so-called thinking and creative jobs face imminent threat, especially in things that involve repetition of standard documents, such as simple contracts. Lawyers and legal secretaries and paralegals beware.

And this from a Wall Street Journal story: Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., said the goal of its AI-enabled automation strategy is to drive growth without adding to the company’s payroll .(https://www.wsj.com/articles/uncertain-economy-spurs-growth-in-ai-powered-office-automation-11675282156?mod=hp_minor_pos4)

THE FUTURE:

We’ll all be homeless, having nothing to contribute in order to earn those tokens which make it possible for us to share earth’s not unlimited resources.

The sad and frightening thing is I don’t think I’m exaggerating, at least not much. We have to ask ourselves: really what is the meaning of our lives and what is it we think we’re going to do when we cede our whole beings, physical and mental, to machines and computer chips?

Skilled craftsmen in all trades and lines of work are already hard to find. In the future we may find out that we’ve forgotten how to do anything.

A plague might kill off our braniest who know how to design and operate the technology, or a power outage might occur, either or both of which could wipe out humanity.

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Here’s something about maybe the law of unintended consequences: I once made my living pounding out stories at a newspaper on a manual typewriter. I was never a good typist. Had to spend a lot of time using a pencil to correct my typos as we used to do before handing them to a copy reader or editor who in turn turned it over to a typesetter. Wow! What a miracle when we got those elctronic keyboards where you could see what you typed on a TV-like screen and make corrections as you go — no fuss, no muss.

Who knew that the cell phone would put traditional newspapers out of business?

I recall that in a journalism class in the early 70s the instructor foretold of something on the horizon that would be some kind of electronic newspaper. What seemed to be envisioned was something that might be about the size of the traditional newspaper page, a kind of electronic board, where the news could be constantly updated. You’d not only get today’s news today, but this minute’s news this minute. I thought that would be a godsend for newspapers, which were already withering on the vine, with the public turning to broadcast, which was expanding its standard five to ten to fifteen minutes of news.

We do have digital newspapers, true. But the ease of which one can get on the internet and disguise content as trustworthy or take in the gullible has had a detrimental effect on our society I believe.

I don’t necessrily call what I write undisputed fact, but I try to make thoughtful and sincere observations. Not so everyone.