Archive for June 5th, 2004
Computers Compute?
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 06/05/2004
In 1900, every large company had several men who spent ten hours a day, including Saturday, sitting side by side at a table doing arithmetic. The got the figures for sales that day, cash on hand that day, and all the other numbers a big business generates, and they then added, subtracted and multiplied the numbers and produced summaries and profit and loss statements.
Obviously somebody had to total up the numbers, and these were guys who did it.
They were called “computers.” Computing was their job.
So when IBM produced a machine to do all this adding and subtracting work, it was called a “computer.”
I remember when all computer courses talked about this interesting evolution of the word computer. “In the old days,” they said, “The word ‘computer’ referred to a man.”
It was a strange idea back then.
A human called a “computer” was an interesting and quaint idea in the 1950s when “computer” meant a large machine produced by IBM.
Today, the thing I am writing on here is called a “computer.” The huge IBM computers of the 1950s were entirely dedicated to computing, that is, adding and subtracting and doing statistical work with numbers.
Today I never use my computer to compute. The dia that computers once computed is every bit as quaint today as the fact that “computer” used to mean a man instead of a machine was in the 1950s.
“I an Jewish and…”
Posted by Bob in Political Correctness on 06/05/2004
I don’t give a damn about Jews. I am furious because the Jewish attitude sucks.
On the “Seinfeld” show, Jerry Seinfeld knew a Catholic who had converted to Judaism and was always making Jewish jokes. Seinfeld said, “I think he just converted for the jokes!”
So Seinfeld went and complained to a Catholic priest about this guy and his constant stream of Jewish jokes.
The priest asked him, very delicately, “And this offends you as a Jewish person?”
Replied Seinfeld, “No, it offends me as a comedian.”
For fifty years, I have listened to people start out with the words, “I am Jewish and…”
The next thing they said was ALWAYS a nasty, vicious remark about the South, about white people, or both.
These “I am Jewish” Jews seem to think I am supposed to get all googly-eyed about how they are Persecuted Jews and not care what they say about MY people.
White goyim don’t have feelings, you see.
Well, this white goy DOES have feelings, and if that is anti-Semitism, then put my name on the Hitler list.
As Patrick Henry said, “If this be treason, then make the most of it.”
Screw labels. Call it “treason” or “racism” or “anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.” I am a free man and I say what I damned well please.
Don’t be a Baby
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 06/05/2004
Popsickle Anyone?
I don’t play the lottery, but I have the ultimate lottery card on my wrist.
In fact, the people who buy lottery tickets are exactly the kind of people who would consider MY lottery ticket to be nuts.
I am one of about five hundred people on earth who is actually signed up to be frozen when I die. The hope is that sometime in the future technology will advance enough to unfreeze us. If the society of the future is rich enough, they will do it for us. It will be entirely their call.
If that happens I will be born into a wealthy world with technology that lets you live forever in youthful health.
That beats any lottery payoff.
Please, please don’t make the desperately tired old joke that you will be glad to put me in your freezer when I die. I got tired of that after the first hundred times I heard it.
Ted Williams got frozen. Walt Disney wanted to, but his doctors lied to him about his coming death and it didn’t happen.
An Arizona group called Alcor does the freezing and storage. I went and studied it. You cannot work for Alcor if you aren’t signed up for freezing. Nobody at Alcor makes much money. It is a fun fraternity to belong to.
Alcor is attacked from all sides.
One thing that makes me hopeful about being unfrozen is that every big time experts TV documentaries interview declare that bringing a frozen person back to life will absolutely never be possible, and that the whole thing is silly.
Experts always say that. One big expert had finished the definitive book on cloning mammals. He had sent in the galleys and the book was on its way to publication. It declared, once and for all, what every expert on mammalian reproduction had said over and over: No one would ever be able to clone a mammal.
It was in exactly that period that the birth of Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was announced. This is routine. Expert always say everything is impossible. If you don’t say that, you don’t get called a Real, Tough, Practical expert who is above the pipe dreams of the masses..
MD’s make up less than one in a thousand of the entire population. Among the five hundred people signed up to be frozen are at least a dozen MDs. The Board of Advisors is full of MDs. There are even more PhDs in biological sciences who are signed up to be frozen. Nobody interviews them.
I wear a metal Alcor medical bracelet on my wrist which is exactly like the bracelet people wear warning emergency room doctors about allergies or other problems. It will be read.
My metal bracelet gives the telephone number of Alcor, where people are always waiting – I call there from time to time on other matters – and other information on what to do if I die.
An Alcor team is always ready to go and do the procedure. They do it regularly all over America. They bring me back for storage with those already there.
As I say, everybody in authority is against this. The dead should have their blood pumped out and formaldehyde pumped into their veins, the way God intended.
Why do people feel they have a right to criticize people for wanting to be frozen? It is outlawed in Saskatchewan. Canada outlaws anything it doesn’t like.
All of Ted Williams’ children except one daughter said he wanted to be frozen. His daughter fought it. Someone called her and said, “Your nightmare is taking place at this moment.” This meant that Williams’ body was being prepared for freezing instead of being embalmed. She wanted him embalmed and buried in the ground with the worms.
Why? Because she said that being embalmed and buried with the worms was “natural.”
Go figure.
Why the hell is this anybody’s business but my own?
If I let everybody know that I wanted to be buried head-down with a rose in each ear, nobody would go to court to fight it. Nobody would call in experts to say that was irrational. They would just do what I told them to do, roses and all.
Diaspora? What Diaspora?
There was a minimum of five million Jews in the Roman Empire. Most of them spoke only Greek and their scriptures were in Greek. That infrastructure became the Christian Church.
The entire Christian doctrine about Jews is based on the idea that almost all Roman Jews were in Israel, spoke Aramaic, and had their scriptures in Hebrew. Then, says the official doctrine, the Jews were driven out of Israel in the first century AD when the Temple was destroyed and have been wanderers ever since, waiting for the Return to the Holy Land of their Fathers.
Meanwhile back on earth a tenth of the Roman Jews were in Israel. They were not driven out. There was no Diaspora.
None of this bothers the psychopaths who make up most of the professional Christian clergy.
Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan really got into the kook category in the 2000 campaign when he announced that the world had to be created in six days because he didn’t want to be kin to a monkey. This has nothing to do with the argument over evolution. It is just plain childish. The idea of grown man saying that is bad, the idea of a serious candidate for national office saying that puts him beyond the pale. That was the day Pat Buchanan put himself in a category with the Vegetarian Party.
Nobody in the media noticed this because they wanted to blame Buchanan’s poll collapse on his limited opposition to immigration. But that was when he became totally discredited. Buchanan always ends up being a harmless religious nut.
The whole right is going that way. They demand that everybody be kept on life support until the body actually begins to stink, the family’s wishes be damned. They fanatically demand the rights of mindless embryos over sick people, they want as much agony as possible for a person who is dying. The actual support for any of this among sane people who have a conscience is nil. The Spanish Inquisition has more real, serious apologists than this crap, but it is rigid conservative doctrine.
It isn’t liberals who are now discrediting conservatives. It is this pseudo-Pro-Life silliness.
I am ashamed to call myself a conservative today. I am anti-liberal, but I am not an idiot or a nut or a sadist.
A Good Psychopath
Posted by Bob in Political Correctness on 06/05/2004
I have been conducting interrogations at every level, from prisons to Capitol Hill, for decades. So I speak with some expertise.
Every professional theologian I have ever met is a psychopath, a.k.a.. sociopath, a person totally incapable of feeling genuine guilt, like Ted Bundy. After a lifetime of practice, an intelligent psychopath is far better at faking guilt than any normal person.
A ballpark estimate is that there are five million psychopaths in the United States.
One Catholic professor has been the official theologian for National Review magazine for decades. Their official historian is Dr. Jaffe, who says America is based on the words “All men are created equal.”
I had lunch with National Review many years ago after he had written a book in which he used the term “WASP,” meaning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. His book was about how virtuous the Catholic ethnics were as opposed to the WASPs. I pointed out to him that I had worked in a lot of campaigns and other movements in Catholic ethnic areas, and they were just like Southern Protestants in the characteristics he cited..
I pointed out that he had coined the word “WASP” because he didn’t dare use the word “Yankee,” which would be accurate and contrast Southern and ethnic virtues with the failures and moral weaknesses of Yankees. He had insulted half of the White Anglo-Saxon population of America in doing this..
Like a good psychopath, he answered, “Yes.” Morally speaking, talking to him was exactly like talking to a robot.
Liberals and respectable conservatives do consider white Southerners the one ethnic group they can insult. But even with that attitude a fashionable liberal or conservative shows some unease when he is caught in this kind of lying insult when facing a white Southerner. This National Review theologian gave me the flat, unemotional response that only comes from a psychopath. I have seen it many, many times and every experienced interrogator picks it up instantly. That is his job..
This is an important and practical matter for an interrogator because lie detector tests and many other methods are useless on psychopaths. So you have to know if you are dealing with one. An interrogator who can’t pick up the fact that someone is a psychopath is like a doctor who can’t find high blood pressure. He is an incompetent.
A psychopath is programmed, and you need to ask questions that don’t hit his programming button to determine whether he is a psychopath.
My question did not trigger this particular religious psychopath’s programming. If I had shown that he had insulted blacks or Jews, his lip would have trembled and his apology would have been public, as his “looking like guilt” programming dictated. As a psychopath with a lifetime’s programming, he would have responded to that stimulus with the proper reaction. But my point about white Southern Protestants did not hit his switch. So he just responded with a robotic “Yes.”




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