99% of the library books in the "Mystery" section are murder mysteries, so that the murder is implicit in the word "mystery" as applied to modern fiction. I'm pretty sure that is due to the post-Christian nature of modern society, which knows of no afterlife, no joys of Heaven to be attained at one's death, with the result that the ultimate crime is murder, and the ultimate punishment is execution. That's why the jury duty I was excused from earlier this week was distinguished from normal jury duties as "special" because it's a murder trial.
Two of the books in my current load from the library are not about murder. Both are billed as "humor" but there are no dead people to be avenged, no killer to be discovered, just odd circumstances. One of them actually better qualifies as "Sci-Fi" (a violation of the laws of physics) rather than a mystery at all. The lead character became invisible (physically impossible, but a popular fiction theme), and the only unresolved question answered in the last chapter was how he would escape the villainous people who want to use his invisibility to commit crime.
Crime was the theme of the book: the lead character is introduced in the first line as a liar and a thief. Being invisible makes his crime rather simpler in many ways, but it has unforseen consequences, which the author does a good job of exploring. He also makes some interesting social commentary early in the book, much in the spirit of my review of Bollywood cinema (see my "Liars Lie" blog post nine years ago)...
It isn't true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high crime rates and a workforce whose only skill is pilferage. All small business has been driven out of Manhattan by the above, but many thousands of these little companies still exist in Queens and Brooklyn, where they can draw from the labor pool on Long Island, people at the competency level of the smiling Burger King kid who gets your order right the second time.A few short chapters later, he introduces the villain of the story, a dirty cop, in the same spirit:
A restaurant can be a very satisfying business... It gave you, as well, a loyal -- or at least fearful -- kitchen staff of illegals, always available for some extra little chore like repainting the apartment or standing in line at the Motor Vehicle or breaking some [sexual assaulting] wisenheimer's leg. It also made a nice supplement to your NYPD sergeant's salary (acting lieutenant, Organized Crime Detail) in your piece of the legit profit, of course, but more importantly in the skim. And it helped make your personal and financial affairs so complex and fuzzy that the shooflys could never quite get enough of a handle on you to drag you before the corruption board.The abject morality of the story's characters is neatly summarized in the last paragraph of the previous chapter, where another of the villains, a lawyer for the tobacco industry, does his own little bit of inner turmoil:
"Of course," Mordon said, and thought, I'm lying. He knows I'm lying. I know he knows I'm lying. But does he know I know he knows I'm lying? And does it make any difference?This is not the ethics that made this country rich and powerful. In 1995 (the copyright date) his New York is a whole generation ahead the rest of this country in dragging the American morals down to where we must necessarily be, so that there is no mention of the USA in Armageddon (that is, the USA is no longer a superpower). It can happen in our lifetime.
The background ethics in this story is a necessary part of the pervasive
crime in the story, and (hopefully, but probably not) a wake-up call to
the rest of us to repent. Other than that, the story is very readable and
plausible (physics notwithstanding). Smoke by Donald Westlake, I
put him on the list to bring more of his novels home, although that alone
is reason enough for there to be no more on the library shelf. The library
staff here, like everything New York in this novel, is post-Christian.
The formula that the Apostle Paul gives for salvation is rather simpler than all that:
If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. -- Rom.10:9I would say this is not an accurate (modern English) translation of the Greek, because we have all drunk the American Kool-Aid: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (read: "people") are created (nonsensically read: "evolved") equal..." Two hundred years ago the Brits understood the word "Lord" to mean "Boss" as in "He gets to tell us what to do and we must do it." Now the word is a meaningless title (like "Hizzonor"), and in its place the operative word is "freedom" as in "Everybody gets to do anything they want to, and if somebody else gets hurt, that's their problem, not mine." So Paul's confession comes out to be nothing more than a magic word phrase you speak once and all your sins (where people get hurt), past, present and future, are forgiven with no change in behavior.
A decade ago CT reported on some research in sub-Saharan African nations, some of which experienced Catholic missionaries during their colonial period, and others had Protestant (see my comments in "God Is Good for You"). The Protestant legacy there -- like that in the USA -- left countries far more educated and wealthier than the Catholics did. There's a reason for that. The Catholics preached a gospel of indulgences (pay your tithes, say your "Hail Mary"s and you go to Heaven. The Protestants also preached a gospel of indulgences (except they were free, no action nor behavior change needed) with a single difference: many of the Protestants taught that people should read the Bible and obey it, and the Bible (but not the sermons from the pulpit) includes a bunch of Do's and Don'ts that people are expected to obey, and people did that. God's indwelling Spirit enables the behavior change, and God still forgives all the past and the occasional present failures, but the future is perfect.
The behavior change is essential. Without it, if everybody went to Heaven
still sinning, then other people would continue to suffer harm and loss,
and Heaven wouldn't be Heaven for the rest of us. There is no heart
transplant at the Pearly Gates in the Bible, the only heart transplant
happens when you accept Jesus as Boss, with the right to tell you what
to do. Little mistakes, you get your feet washed. But if you are not moving
in the direction of total obedience, if you have not already arrived there
by the end of your life, God cannot allow you into his Heaven. That message
is in the Bible, to be read and obeyed by all who believe, but it does
not get preached, neither from Catholic nor from Protestant pulpits.
I showed up earlier this week, and it turned out only to be a registration process, a couple of questionaires, the big one with a dozen or more pages was apparently designed to weed out potential jurors whose decision could be predicted before the trial -- obviously the DA wants to eliminate jurors who would vote to acquit, and the defense attorney wants to eliminate the other side. I'm probably disqualified on any one of a half-dozen questions, for example something like (I don't remember the exact words) "Do you have negative feelings for police? If so, explain." The only time I was ever assaulted as an adult was here in Grants Pass, and the investigating cop wrote me up as the perp. I think the DA at that time decided he'd never get a conviction, but he dawdled over it for several weeks, during which time I was unable to know what was happening. Now I have a police record for an "arrest" with no way to clear my name. Every time I think about the incident, I resolve to never again cooperate with (speak to) the police for any reason, on Fifth Amendment grounds. My answer to their question was shorter (leaving out the non-cooperate part) to fit in the space. Although I did say "different circumstances" in relation to this trial, I expect them to disqualify me. No big deal, since Covid I have been wearing a mask in all enclosed public places -- and I don't even get a cold any more, except the one time I took it off to eat in a restaurant -- and the jury sits in two rows of crowded chairs during the trial (no "social distance"), so jury duty would have an undesirable health effect on me.
Another question had a much more profound implication. They wanted to know if I had ever taken training in any of a half dozen or so categories, none of which I remember except the middle one: "Religion." Maybe they think that religious nuts would be more hostile to lawbreakers (or perhaps to "oppressive" police work), although I answered numerous questions more specific to such hostility as "No." But the more I think about it, the more it annoys me than anybody who ever went to Sunday School would be automatically disqualified. That means that any such person -- including myself -- if we were ever on trial for any reason at all, would be denied a fair trial by a "jury of [our] peers" including people of faith who believe that "All law is God's Law." Of course God is bigger than any human jury, and "The heart of the King is in the hand of the LORD, Who turns it any way He wants to." But religious discrimination like that should be unlawful -- as indeed it is!
Oh well, the last six months I have been continually reminded that Ore-gone is "a fly-over state" where quality products and services are not available, now also including Justice. Many decades ago I decided that "America has the finest justice that money can buy: I didn'tpay for any, so I didn't get any." Now even more so in Ore-gone.
Postscript, It's now after hours at the end of the second week, and nobody called. Nobody dismissed me from jury duty. They still have Monday morning during voir dire (its Latin meaning is different from the French I learned in school), when either lawyer can toss me out for any reason or no reason. I guess the questionaire is only to inform their questions at that time. Hey, jurors can bring any verdict they choose for any or no reason (it's called "nullification" because they can effectively nullify the law or the evidence or even the judge's instructions) but at least there are 12 and they have to agree, and (usually) the truth is easier for all 12 to agree on than "no reason". Anyway, if the jury can do it, and the judge can do it, why not the lawyers. The lawyers are not even required to tell the truth in their in-trial questions -- an example a question that is a lie: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" I don't know about lawyers in a real court, but on TV they lie all the time.
Statistically I have a 7% chance of getting chosen (14 jurors out of 200 candidates), perhaps only 1% after all the disqualifying questiions are considered. Einstein famously once said "God doesn't roll dice" -- which is true: "The heart of the king is in the hand of the LORD..." Maybe God has something He wants me to say to another juror (which is the only time a juror is allowed to talk). Or maybe this exercise had no purpose other than allowing me to think about the process and post it here. Yeah, that must be it.
Second postscript, Monday morning. I don't remember much of what was on those questionaires -- and they did not give me a copy; I thought to ask, but their apparent non-communicative policy suggested that asking would be futile -- perhaps they asked my preferred communication medium, and if they did, I most certainly said snail mail. I go to the Post Office once a week (unless I'm expecting something of high priority, like today) so... Nothing today from the County.
It occurs to me that the defendant in this case is entitled to a jury of his "peers" and (by reason of my religious education) I am definitely not one of his peers, so I suppose that the defense attorney should have the right to exclude me, but if this is a boilerplate (standard form) question, that gives the DA the opportunity to exclude my peers when I am the defendant. It's ugly, any way you look at it, about what one might expect in a Blue state (dominated by the political party most hostile to my Christian faith, it gets colored blue on the network election night results map).
I went. Less than a half-dozen people were notified not to come. After a delay of nearly three hours, we finally filed into the courtroom. I asked about social distance, and the bailiff asked the judge and he said no. Everybody was very careful to be polite and inoffensive, but the judge was not in a mood to excuse anybody who did not claim whatever hardship would actually affect his or her impartiality. One guy owns a small carpentry (cabinets) shop, and his guys would not be able to proceed without him there to give them their work and direction, and he needed to be there to get new business, and if there's nothing for them to do and he couldn't pay them, he'd have a hard time replacing them after the trial, but he was not excused. I've been there, but California only chooses jurors from voter rolls, and I only registered to vote on the last day when there was somebody to vote for, then de-registered immediately after voting, so I never got called up.
The defense attorney got the first shot at "challenging" jurors, and after addressing maybe a half-dozen potentials that she had marked her copy of their questionaires -- I think one woman was excused by reason of being sick and tending to a sick sister -- the attorney gave a general call for hardship cases, and I raised my hand, and asked about social distance again. She wanted to make it all about whether the stress would impair my ability to reason objectively, and I tried to say that my objectivity was not at stake, my health is, and even that is only statistical. I wear a mask and if nobody coughs or sneezes on me, no problem. Maybe I get sick (and die) before the trial is over, maybe not. I mentioned (I forget why, perhaps a God thing) that if I'd known about the lack of social distance when they offered the age exemption, I would have taken it. She: "Are you over 70?" Me: "Yes." Judge: "Excused for cause." In other words, not for financial or health hardship, but because the law specifies an age exemption. Whatever.
My opinion of the quality of justice in Oregon is not improved over
six
paragraphs (ten days) ago.
Rex Stout is written in the first person, but it seems to be more in the style of Watson's Sherlock (very little inner turmoil), perhaps also because most of it is a hundred years old, before there was such a thing as "Chick Lit". Unfortunately, the last of the three (by copyright date) was well into the modern era, with increased inner turmoil, especially involving politics (Watergate). I read fiction as a low cognitive burden, when I'm too tired to work but not yet sleepy enough to turn off the light, religion and politics don't qualify; I almost didn't finish it. If there were any more (later) Rex Stout novels on the shelf, they'd stay there. In another week or two I'll be done with this library's fiction. The holdings have deteriorated substantially since I first started here eight years ago, perhaps because they are now supported by tax revenues. It's a "Blue State" (left-wing politics, which favors female interests) and a "fly-over" state, in which quality products and services are much less available.
sigh
Well, I also seem to be deteriorating, now within two or three years
(by age) of when both my parents started losing their marbles. God can
do anything he wants to, so maybe He'll take me quick (like my sister),
or maybe I'll stay compos mentis longer (one guy in Sunday School
is still sharp at ninety-something), God only knows.
First you need to understand that every living person consumes a certain amount of natural and/or artificial resources just staying alive. Some of those resources grow on trees, but they are not trees in every person's back yard. Most of it involves substantial labor and processing and transportation to get it from its natural state to the form and place we need it to be so we can eat it. In the distant historical past, everybody grew or gathered or killed their own food, and most of their waking hours were consumed doing that. Then factory farms were invented, so that only a few people could grow -- and eventually process -- and transport a lot of food to people who were thus freed up to do other things. The growers and processors and truckers need to be paid, so money was invented to pay them. Money does not grow on trees, so everybody needs to do something useful that somebody else is willing pay for, thereby to earn enough money to buy the resources we all consume in living. When the growers and processors and truckers get efficient enough, they have money left over to spend on other things.
Where does everybody else's money come from? Somebody must create wealth. The government can print money, but that destroys wealth. We need people making things out of nothing (or at least taking them out of the ground like farmers and miners do) to create wealth. This is very hard to do well, so very few people are successful at doing it, but they earn a lot of money, which they deserve because they are creating wealth that the rest of us can use up. This is basic Econ 101, how the world works.
Why are there no women creating huge amounts of wealth? Probably because they don't want to. Not many guys want to either. That's why we pay so much to the ones who do want to. They get very rich, and they earned it. Anybody can do it -- if they want to. Most of us add a small value to somebody else's creation, and we get paid accordingly. Some people beg or steal the wealth they need to live on, and in a very rich country like the USA, we can afford that, because we have so many people creating more wealth than they need. You cannot steal wealth that has not been created by somebody else.
So now we have WIRED's "Global Editorial Director"
-- who is a woman, because only women complain about what they don't want
to fix -- saying "women like money, and we're coming to take some of yours."
In other words, she wants to steal it rather than earn it. Thieves never
become very rich, that only comes from creating wealth = goods and services
that other people want to pay for. She is editor of a magazine that is
losing subscribers, because she does not know how to create something the
lots of people want to pay for. WIRED magazine was
sort of like that when (guys) invented it, but they sold it to a publishing
conglomerate that did not understand the industry nor the readers. It stopped
creating wealth, leaving only (female) whiners to complain about it. Magazines
in general are not what people want to pay for, at least not this century.
Basically a couple India immigrants (Indian names, but living in Seattle area) decided to do a "feature film" movie using off-the-shelf "AI" tools. The tools are programmed by programmers to resemble videos that real people produce, but they only work well for a couple minutes. This article explains some of the hurdles the producers had to jump over to make a longer flick.
The only "intelligence" in the software is explicitly (or implicitly)
programmed by the developers, who were aiming it at YouTube creators. This
article concludes with the hopeful prediction that future tools will better
serve feature-length production. Unstated is the fact that Bollywood flicks
lack the kind of originality that you see in American films -- which are
done by (actually) intelligent human screen-writers and directors -- so
the programmers can conceivably write code that does that. Computers can
only be as intelligent as the programmers program them to be, which is
substantially less than the programmers themselves, and in the case of
"AI" software, is rather less than ordinary college graduates. Good enough
for the India domestic market, but not America (nor even American exports).
As you know, I'm already heavy into Scripture. I don't have a single favorite verse, but if somebody were to ask, I might answer "2 Tim.3:16" because it effectively nullifies the question. "ALL Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for" [all kinds of good stuff]. Ten months of every year I read through the Psalms, one each day, and the other two months (both 31-day months) I do the 31 chapters of Proverbs. I'm not much into poetry, so it's pretty tough going, and my Hebrew is falling off, so I make allowances... Then, after that exercise, I work through the Bible. I tried once or twice to do the whole Bible in a year, but it covered too much material each day for any of it to stick, so I went back to a chapter a day, Genesis to Revelation. A couple years ago I finished the second time through in the original Hebrew and Greek, and decided it might be more helpful if I alternated Old Testament and New, and maybe even divided each in half, alternating first and second halves (the OT historical books vs prophecy, and the NT historical books vs epistles). I recently finished Ecclesiastes and started Romans (having already done Genesis and Matthew, both pretty easy reading; Ecclesiastes is poetry and rather nihilistic, but I'm surprised at how few words in Romans I need to look up in the dictionary at the back). I'm down to a half chapter or less, which seems to help with understanding.
Yesterday I did the first half of Rom.3, which ended with an unconditional condemnation of "The end justifies the means" argument, and I got to thinking about a single unexplained word in the last Lord Peter Wimsey novel I finished last week: "Rimmon." It's an obscure reference to 2Kings 5:18, where the prophet Elisha blesses the (former) leper Naaman who asked permission to bow (but not worship) in the heathen temple because it was his job to be there for his boss to lean on in that place. In the modern context it was used as an "end justifies the means" argument for an otherwise devout Christian woman working for Wimsey (he paid otherwise unsupported women as secretaries and gofers) doing something "illegal" in support of his getting an innocent women acquitted in a murder trial. Endland was already becoming post-Christian at the time Dorothy Sayers wrote this novel, but she obviously expected her readers to understand the one-word reference (as did I!) and to agree with the unsound logical inference (as I did not). Naaman was not asking permission to sin, but only to be in a place and position that might be misunderstood as sin. I don't know about British law from a hundred years ago. but Sayers made clear in her reporting of Wimsey setting out the task, that this woman (if caught) could go to jail. He was telling her to do it, just don't get caught, same as the immoral advice our own King SCOTUS gave to every schoolchild in America beginning in the mid-1980s when they took the statement of moral absolutes off public schoolroom walls.
Today I finished Romans chapter 3, and despite the fond belief of most American pastors (Feelers every one of them), Paul is very much in favor of moral absolutes and God's Law:
Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. -- [Rom.3:31 oNIV]
Also yesterday, the title of Psalm of the day, Psalm 9, which I
read as "To the chief musician, upon the death of [a] son, a psalm for
David," and then noticed that the interlinear gloss did not translate the
two words "death [of]" and "son," leaving them as names. So I looked in
the NIV, and they translated it as I did. It doesn't make much sense, because
the Psalm is David thanking God for rescue from his enemies, so the NIV
text turned the whole phrase into a title of the tune this Psalm was to
be sung to. Poetry is pretty obscure in its own time, and 3000 years has
not helped much. David was a hard-core Feeler (which I am not even slightly)
and most of his psalms either ask God's help against enemies, or else thank
God for such help, and (with a few exceptions noted here in my blog when
it's happening) I mostly don't have any enemies. These Psalms are for the
majority of God's people around the world who do have enemies. I'm OK with
that.
People with a job to do don't have time to read. I'm getting old and slowing down. I have not stopped working, but the all-nighters are fewer and and I often run out of gas before the end of the day. I'm not sleepy enough to go to sleep, and sitting in front of the boob toob provokes hand-to-mouth exercises that put on unnecessary weight. Last August I hit a 10- or 20-year weight low, mostly by working long hours and eating one meal at the end of the day. That was 38 pounds down from an all-time high about a year ago, when I decided to get more intentional. I'm slipping -- perhaps it is the cold of winter -- but I'm back up 15 pounds. So I'm trying to read more and watch movies less.
Anyway, women read more than men -- "Them what can, do; them what can't, teach." And those who can't teach, read books and watch movies or (yuk!) TV. Men are mostly Doers, women read more.
Male authors, seeing the far larger market for Chick Lit, do a good job of imitating female authors. The brief plot summary on the inside front jacket usually gives some clues: "Psycho-thriller" and "secrets from the past" are both code for inner turmoil. Chapters beginning with the first-person pronoun "I" likewise. You can do inner turmoil in third-person narrative, but it's much more natural by self-disclosure.
Dorothy Sayers wrote a hundred years ago, when male tastes dominated the market, and she did a pretty good imitation of a male author. I saw Lord Peter Wimsey on TV when I was a kid, so I saw her name on the library shelf -- only four or five books! -- and she beats out all the other female authors in readability (I suppose that's why there are dozens of her books not on the shelf), but the one I just finished, she didn't do so well. I probably won't go back for any more.
Irrelevance seems to be part and parcel of growing old. I mostly can't
stand what passes for music in church either, and I can't find any buyers
for my programming skills. sigh
As TV shows go, Protectors was more tolerable than most, but I don't
think I'll bother with any more. I gave up on "Elementary" (see "Feminazi
Sherlock Holmes" two months ago) about the second or third episode
in the third season. TV is like that, lower budget than movies, so much
lower quality screen writing.
In his opening paragraph he says,
...it is estimated that autonomy reduce [car] crashes since 94% of serious crashes are due to human error.That's only true if the autonomous vehicle crashes are not due to human error. What nonsense! Every car in the world, autonomous or not, is designed and manufactured by humans -- or by robots designed and manufactured and programmed by humans -- and those humans make just as many mistakes as the ones driving the vehicles, perhaps even more because the autonomous vehicles are controlled by millions of lines of code that imports unverified (possibly malicious) "open source" library code, and/or by trillions of "machine learned" parameters mostly trained on unsupervised data, and which not even the vendors know how they make their artificially "intelligent" decisions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is so important for the lawyers and computer gurus to absolve (themselves and) their vehicles of any fault when people die in those crashes. Why? Follow the money. A couple pages later,
To realize the consumer and commercial benefits of autonomous driving, auto OEMs and suppliers may need to develop new sales and business strategies, ...He goes on to mention "new technological capabilities and address concerns about safety" but the business issues -- read "money" -- come first. On the matter of safety, he mentions ISO 26262, which he tells us is an international safety standard that "does not fully cover the safety requirements of AV features..." because autonomous vehicles "are not fully specifiable, while ISO 26262 implicitly assumes that all functionality is specified. He seems to think that it should be watered down so that the inherently unspecifiable responses to random traffic conditions do not figure in the safety standards. We train human drivers to be able to cope with whatever they find on the road, why should we trust an autonomous vehicle that is completely unspecified in that arena?
In summary, due to the technical, legal, and other challenges just described, achieving level 5 autonomy remains at least five to 10 years away."Level 5" is the top of an obsolete 5-level scale for grading degrees of autonomy. I say "obsolete" because none of the perpetrators refer to it any more. Anything requiring a human to fill in for less than fully autonomous driving is unrealistic: either the human is fully in control, or their attention is diverted eslewhere so that they cannot recover from whatever situation is deemed too complex for the robot to deal with. Not only is level-5 the only form of autonomy anybody considers, there are commercial robot taxis on the streets of San Francisco (and probably other cities) today with no human in control at all. The only way this can happen at all is by blatantly disregarding safety considerations, just as programmers are increasingly doing all over the computer industry.
Because some forty years ago King SCOTUS decreed that the only ethical standard ever taught to American school children must be removed from schoolroom walls, thereby giving those (and all subsequent) kids implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder -- just don't get caught, and nobody ever expects to get caught, even though some of them regularly are -- and those kids are now running American businesses and governments, and are programming the robots driving the autonomous vehicles already on the nation's streets and highways. And if "Formal Safety Standards" ever get defined to cover those vehicles, they will absolve the perpetrators of the inevitable car crashes of all fault. Like Ford's Pinto, the manufacturers will deem litigation less costly than getting it right in the first place.
Until some celebrity's kid gets run over, and finds a high-power lawyer
to go after the manufacturer, and the jury sets aside the new laws for
a high-priced punitive damages award. Juries can do that (it's called "nullification"
which means they can return any verdict they can agree on, without regard
to the law or the facts or the judge's instructions, effectively "nullifying"
those rules. And that will be the end of autonomous vehicles driven by
computers programmed by people. And there are no other programmers, not
now, not ever.
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