Social Media

 I do not use social media, unless you consider my 20 year old blog one. But the blog is purely one way, I really do not care what anyone thinks, it just reflects current issues.

But I am being bombarded with Facebook stuff from family members. Frankly it is 99% advertising, selling stuff I would have no interest in. Then it includes the politically correct junk that must mean something to someone. 

What had struck me was that as I had projected years ago it is a psych profiling and psych motivation system. Why would anyone knowingly subject themselves.

The companies operating these useless and dangerous systems must be making a fortune on targeted ads. Why would anyone click on an ad on Facebook? Where would it take you, how would it profile you?

Try writing a letter, you know, paper and pen, then envelope, then mail it. No ads! 

A Midnight Visitor

 My local fox comes around late at night.

Beware the Bishops

 I just completed a first draft of a book on the period of Constantine I. He was the Roman Emperor who made Christianity the formal religion of the Empire. He was frankly a brutal ruler who even executed his oldest son for some less than credible accusations, then took after his then wife and had her boiled in steam. Not a person you would want to cross. 

So as he expends his domain to the East he inherits the Eastern Bishops. Unlike the Western ones, who he learned about Christianity, the Eastern ones were as ruthless as Constantine. This led to the Council of Nicaea, allegedly to agree on just what Jesus was. Was he God made man, man made God, or what. It was an issue that never arose in the West, not much any how.

But now Constantine, who had destroyed all of his competitors, slaughtered his son and wife, met his match. The Bishops were viciously divided on the question of just what Jesus was. It became a Greek definition battle, in words. It also led to street battles amongst the common folk in cities like Alexandria where fights were often to the death as to just what was Jesus.

Now we have US Bishops taking similar stands, politically divisive one. As the NY Times notes:

 The statement, passed at the bishops’ annual conference in Baltimore, did not call out President Trump by name, but the context was clear. The bishops said they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.” “We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity,” the statement said. “For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.” The bishops, who were often divided by American politics in the Pope Francis era, showed a united front in standing behind Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, who has spoken out for immigrants and urged U.S. bishops to do the same. The statement, called a special message, is a rare pastoral document that the bishops can issue only at their annual meeting, in order to address pressing circumstances of the day.

 Now we are not inferring that the President is Constantine, not even slightly, but we see the Bishops are asserting domain over things which is not their purview. Bishops have been doing this ever more so and perhaps they should take a look at the history of Bishops and politics. 

Of all the battles Constantine fought, with hundreds of thousands of opponents, the most difficult one was that with the bishops!  Beware the Bishops!

"Sink the Bismark!"

 I have tried to avoid politics. But the Navy I know a bit. First my father served in the Pacific and particularly in the Battle of Surigao Strait. Second, I got a Naval Officer's Appointment be declined on advice of my father. Third, in writing the book of my father's ship, I learned a bit about Naval warfare and why my father had me decline. 

The Navy always has battle plans, such as War Plan Orange. But once the war starts the battle plans go out the window. We saw the last of the Battle ships in Korea, just big dumb platforms with guns. The Japanese did us a favor of getting rid of most of them on December 7th. We fought in the Pacific with carriers and destroyers. Carriers helped land forces and destroyers became the first meshed warfare systems using communications and intelligence with limited but deadly weapons.

So when someone wants to renew the battleship I wonder what war they are fighting. The Germans lost the Bismark,  it was a floating steel mess that was vulnerable. The call of "Sink the Bismark" was well heard across the Royal Navy. The US got Yamamoto. I would be wary to name a battleship after let us say me! That would be the prime target to get sunk.

It is clear that any war in the Pacific would be littoral. A coastal way involving highly interconnected small craft integrated into some command structure. The chance we would ever use a battleship is zero. It could be destroyed by low cost drones carrying low yield nukes! One would never see them coming and no direct his would be necessary. Swarming is quite effective and proven at Surigao.

 

 

AI Regulation?

 In almost all regulating laws there is a front section defining what is regulated. But 2 years ago I detailed the problems with AI, namely how does one define it so it can be regulated? Legislators and administrations are really the worst, and dare I say incompetent, entities to define this.

We know that basically AI is composed of three things. First the processors or hardware. Second the complex software structures. Third the massive amounts of data. Therein lies the problem, Each is unique, each is ever changing, and each by itself cannot be adequately defined.

We can regulate the telephone network of days of yore, we can regulate the electrical network, but we cannot even try to define AI dispositively. So stop with the regulation. Otherwise you may need a separate Supreme Court just to regulate the regulation! 

Nonsense, and How Do You Wash the Windows

 Frank Gehry passed away recently. I had the misfortune to spend some time in one of his monstrosities, the Stata Center at MIT. I always wondered how one washes the windows. Why were the rest rooms hidden away and sized for one each. It was a grossly dysfunctional building.

But if you are one of the left wing types you glorify it. Especially if you never tried to function in one of them. As The New York Review notes:

The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set. Although his dramatic departure from architectural convention was at first confrontational and forbidding, it gradually became more buoyant and embracing. As his clients’ budgets increased and he moved from corrugated metal to shiny titanium, unfinished plywood to polished Douglas fir, and rubber matting to travertine flooring, his architecture lost none of its expressive power and appealed to many who’d found his earlier tough-guy efforts more alienating than audacious. But he was never to everyone’s taste, including Marxist intellectuals averse to an architecture of pleasure, who saw him as an agent of capitalist corporate branding

 The buildings just did not work. Why should a great university like MIT have this colossal clump of metal and dirty windows, leaking like a sieve, disconnected from everything else on campus. One missed the old hallways of the original buildings. One had to scurry about hidden hallways in hopes of finding the adjoining location. 

Buildings must adhere to their functions. Not the bizarre ideas of some over paid architect.  

The F Word

 In the winter of 1961, when I was still in Secondary School, I had managed to get my college admissions done with scholarships. I had passed all my Regents Exams so I had a Regents Diploma. So I thought I could just slide the second half of my Senior year. My father, not so much. He decided that I should learn what work was like, not the kind of stuff college grads did in suits and polished shoes and clean nails. But real down and dirty work.

January 1961 in New York was cold and snowy. My father got me a job, with my Headmaster approval, working for the NY Sanitation Department clearing sewer drains along the road ways. I got up at 4 AM, dressed as warmly as possible, took the bus, the first one at 4:35 that go me to the Garage at 5:30. I clocked in and met my "fellow" workers. They were a couple of years older than me, High School dropouts for the most part, many married with kids! Unlike contemporary students off to the Swiss Alps I was off to the Port Richmond garage. My peers there were not ones who could advance my career. 

Every day I would be out with a team clearing sewer drains in freezing slush getting splashed by passing trucks. But one thing I did get was the use of the F word.

Now in my school one rarely if ever heard it used. It was at the time the lowest of the low words. But here I heard it used as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunctive, and every possible word form. In fact there was one fellow who could, with hand and arm motions, conduct a conversation with that one word alone! After a few weeks I could understand him. I did realize that one could not have a dictionary for such speech since it did involve human facial and hand expressions!

Thus I have always associated the use of this word to Staten Island the the Sanitation Department. I could out Soprano the Sopranos. Once some dude in New York tried to intimidate a few well dressed colleagues and myself. The use of my Staten Island dialect and the F word sent him scurrying for fear of his existence! Amazing what that word could do. It transformed me n my Brooks Bros attire into a street wise guy, with possible connections that one did not want to upset. It was the lowest class language available but intimidating.

In today's world we now have "ladies" and "politicians" using it without any form of proper training. It sounds foolish and out of place. They all failed to get educated in the Garage. In fact their use is laughable! As are they. 

Sneaky ISP

 My local ISP, CATV provider, is pushing that you get their "new" gateway and WiFi unit. The call it "great news". Unfortunately all they want to do is to get you to eliminate your secure home WiFi and install their unit under their control and which allows for the CATV company to establish a second WiFi to support their services on your dime! 

I testified as an expert on this issue almost a decade ago. Won the case. But it also allows me to opine on the facts as well as the principle. 

My advice, get your own WiFi and do not let these characters into your network. Or anyone else for that mater! 

Annual Letters

 I had an interesting connect this week. First my semi-annual secondary school luncheon. The attendees was down to eight from the usual twenty just five years ago. Each of us has had our crises and losses, including luncheon ones directly. Age does creep up. Then the second connect was one annual "letter" filled with pictures and happy faces across the posh spots of the globe. As if there was some immunity to family crises.

If I were to send out an annual letter it would be akin to my luncheon conversation. Age does creep up, and all family members have challenges. My five grandchildren each have set a separate pathway in life. My namesake grandson is a successful CPA and soon to marry a charming psychologist. My oldest grandson is a police officer married to an El Salvador descendant and with my first great grand child.  One grand-daughter is a forestry major grad somewhere in the upper Michigan peninsula in sub zero temps and feet of snow doing something on trees. Go Figguah! The other grand daughter is finishing business school wondering what is next. Finally the youngest grandson is in retail. He knows more about inventory, market demands, personnel management than any Harvard MBA. It helps to work in the trenches.

So if we had a family letter it would be work, work, work! Each different, none like their grandfather. 

Instead of regaling our fine times, I listen to and support my ailing colleagues and assist the next steps with family members. As one ages, meetings become medical appointments, entertainment becomes watching BritBox reruns, travel is hospital visits for friends. But that is life amongst the common folk.

Yes, I still have many colleagues I stay in contact with from California, Moscow, Greece, Singapore and the places I spent time at in business, rarely at what could be called pleasure. 

So to all those whose year has had its bumps, and few "grand moments", I commiserate, but laud your life of interesting challenges.