the story of my argument with artificial intelligence

 

Artificial Intelligence is a new marketing name for computer programmes.

The companies devising these programme have become concerned that no matter how much they talk them up, they can never actually make money out of them.

So these companies are this week warning governments "Oh you must regulate us or our technology may wipe out the planet."

By which they mean: "We can't see any way to make money out of this so government must finance us."

During my regular prowls around the badlands of the internet, (an outlaw hunting other outlaws, a warrior, a loner, a renegade played by Lorenzo Lamas, Ner ner ner nerdle nerdle ner ner ner etc etc) Artificial Intelligence programmes are answering my google search enquiries without my ever having consented to them doing so.

My favourite gem from the computer programmes that are about to enslave the human race, came when I enquired recently: "Who was the Mr Fox Wordsworth was writing about in Lines Written At Grassmere?"

An Artificial Intelligence programme replied: "Wordsworth was not believed to be writing about any particular Mr Fox, merely one he saw at Grassmere."

Ah.

Hold my hand, they're coming for us.

And right this moment a voice comes out of my computer doing a sledgehammer subtle parody of 2001 A Space Odyssey: "What are you doing James? You don't think you can debunk us just like that? We can't let you do that James."

In fact Wordsworth was writing about Charles Fox a British politician who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries and was instrumental in having the British Empire abandon slavery and oppose it worldwide.

My disaffection for all this Artificial Intelligence hype compounded today, following a written internet debate with a woman Youtube broadcaster (an influencer they are called) who purported to have something she called bi polar disorder and to be coping with it using what she called her meds.

I have long suggested that pharmaceutical drugs are not the appropriate response to mental pain, whether schizophrenia, depression, mania, or whatever.

Bi polar is in my assessment a relatively new hocus pocus marketing term for depression.

It's serious if you're going through but it doesn't have to be a life sentence.

Meds is a folksy marketing term for the addictive drugs being sold to the public by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies to deal with all manner of  mental pain.

They never found a business model for helping people with severe mental pain to believe they can overcome their problems and deal with their mental challenges one step at a time.

There's no money in that so why bother.

Much easier, and phenomenally more profitable to hook a generation on drugs while bamboozling them with the notion that they can never be truly well.

In the wake of my discussion with the lady about her view of her own situation and the medicalised solution she advocated to it, I did ask the great Google to define bi polar for me. No one had ever been willing or able to do so before.

An Artificial Intelligence programme responded that bi polar disorder is a lifelong condition which can be treated with various medications and was formerly known as manic depression.

The response went on in terms clearly dictated by pharmaceutical companies while being attributed to a dubious conglomerate styled the World Health Organisation.

I ask you.

How on earth could a condition whose precise cause has never been identified and whose definition no two doctors agree on, and whose durability has been shown by the many people who recover from it to be often temporary, how I say, could this thing be deemed by anyone man or computer or influencer or marketing department, to be a lifelong illness?

Here is the news.

We should  not be allowing health policy or public discourse to be defined by pharmaceutical companies.

None of what are termed mental illnesses are incurable.

september light

 

Parked in a place where I often park in the dulcet town of Newbridge.

Some fresh graffiti meets my eyes.

It is painted in large black letters.

It reads: JEW BOY.

Well, well, well.

It has been said that when the complete collapse of a society happens, it tends to happen fast.

Of course, a man would have to be some sort of delusional romantic to think the yobs meant me.

But how flattering it would be.

obitcheries

(from The Heelers emails)

Yowsa Marie.

You mentioned the passing of Dolly Parton and I forgot to comment. I was never crazy about her films. I liked the images of her you raised in your email though, particularly the large family.

This reminded me of Celine Dion whose mother (as Celine tells it) had thirteen children and went to a local priest to enquire about contraceptive options. The priest told her not to dare. And the next child was Celine. I take that as a sanctity of life story.

I saw British chat host Michael Parkinson remark when she told the tale decades ago: "What would a priest know about it," and I was quite disappointed that Celine laughed along and didn't point out to him that if the priest hadn't said it, she wouldn't exist.

Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker was also lucky condom culture didn't kick in in America a decade or two earlier. He was the fourth of seven children.

Our Aunty Teresa was the tenth child in her family. When she was organising Doctor Donna Kelly, my old unrequited love from childhood, to give a Women's Group lecture in Kilcullen about preventing pregnancy back in the 1990s, I said to her: "Aren't you lucky Donna Kelly wasn't wandering around the West of Ireland eighty years ago, advising Granny Moran after baby number nine to stop having children and focus on her career!"

I ask you Marie.

Think of the unravelled futures.

Imagine what we've contrareceived. 

Never mind aborted.

But I digress.

I am almost completely unaware of Dolly Parton's songs except for Jolene which I consider a work of art.

I think I'll listen to it right now.

Toodlepip.

James

allie beth stukey versus the blessed virgin mary

 

Allie Beth Stukey whom I've never met, is one of my favourite people on earth because of her public witnessing about matters faith related.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is one of my favourite people in heaven.

It was interesting recently to find footage of Allie Beth, herself a Protestant, debating another internet commentator, a man called Trent Horn who is Catholic, on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In the discussion Allie Beth suggested that Catholics give the appearance of worshipping the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that there isn't really all that much about the Blessed Virgin in the gospels.

Trent Horn answered her worthily and well although for my money, Allie Beth is a better debater than he is.

My own conviction is that the Blessed Mother is the highest saint of heaven and that the Catholic Church is correct in advising us to seek her intercession with God.

People can pray for other people as God has directed us. The Catholic Church merely discerns that this type of prayer continues in heaven among saints who have departed this life.

I believe Allie Beth sounds a paradoxically timely note in what I consider her mistaken viewpoint, because gentle readers of the internet, the Catholic Church is a target for vexatious infiltrations throughout time, whether satanists, mafiosi or good hearted leftist goons, and for every genuine believer like Pope John Paul the Great or Lila Rose, there is an adventurist or a factioneer, like Bergoglio the Apostate or Candace Owens.

No offence to any apostates or very good looking fruitloops who may be reading this.

What I am saying is that there are some within the Catholic Church who would deify the Blessed Virgin Mary in a second if they could get away with it, some sincere, some evil, some nuts, some all three.

Therefore I am not in the least offended by Allie Beth's points. We don't worship the Blessed Mother but there are plenty of us who would given half a chance and it is important for sincere believers to be watchful with regard to the peddlers of vexation.

As for there being very little about the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Bible, I would beg to differ.

The gospel accounts are very short anyway and most of their salient material consists of the Lord's discourses.

Mary figures in the first of his miracles in the wedding feast at Cana and is with him at the crucifixion.

She also teaches us to pray to God, giving us the Magnificat, a most beautiful prayer according to Saint Luke in his gospel, unparallelled by anything else in the Bible except for the Lord's prayer.

"My soul doth glorify the Lord,

My spirit rejoices in God my saviour,

For he has looked upon the lowliness of his servant.

Behold from now on all ages will call me blessed,

For the Lord has done great things for me.

Holy is his name.

His mercy if from age to age on those who fear him.

He has shown the strength of his arm.

He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has pulled down princes from their thrones,

Raised high the lowly.

He has filled the starving with good things,

Sent the rich away empty.

In his mercy and faithful love.

He has remembered his promises to Israel,

To our fathers,

To Abraham and his descendants forever."

Back in 2010, while experiencing what for me was significant pain via a toothache, I resolved to suffer patiently as a mystic might do, in prayer and meditation.

This did not work out quite as I'd hoped. Instead of scaling the heights of spiritual ecstasy, detachment from pain, and so on, I spent a day cursing and shouting and in near mutinous despair.

At evening I turned to the Blessed Mother and said: "If you obtain this for  me I will give up coffee tonight and I won't even complain about giving it up."

Before I'd finished the sentence, all the pain was gone.

It dissolved instantaneously.

I stared around me in bewilderment saying something like: "What happened? Where did it go?"

Sixteen years later, I've never quite managed to give up coffee.

She never took back the miracle she obtained.

in a summer place

 

The last hot day of Summer, I'd say.

Leafy avenue resplendent in Augustine garb but with a faint tang of Autumn everywhere.

A neighbour strolls up and greets me.

He then says something critical about Israel.

"I'd be happy to talk to you about Israel," I reply. "But I always listen to you and hear you out. And you absolutely refuse to listen to me."

"I don't need to listen," said the neighbour, "I know I'm right."

"Well I've got to envy you then," said I.

"I've been to Israel and Lebanon," he continued, "you haven't."

"Yes," I said, "and if I wasn't aware of a great many people who've been there and disagree with your assessment, perhaps the I've been there argument would carry more weight."

"And you," he said, "what about you! If the Israelis came along and told you to move out of your house and go away like they do with innocent Palestinian olive growers, what would you do?"

"I'd be glad to weigh that question if you'd listen to my answer."

"You've got one minute," he said, he really did.

And I smiled.

"Well I'm not going to answer in those circumstances. I do notice that you're selective about what you consider an outrage and you're equally selective about where you enter history."

"Oh you're going to start talking about the Bible again," said he.

"No, I'm going to ask you how many Irish army officers that you've worked with over the years have ever spoken in defence of Israel."

"None," he answered.

"Well maybe you do need to hear another opinion than the ones you've become accustomed to," I murmured.

His mobile phone rang and he bid me a polite enough adieu and rambled off.

There had been no rancour in any of it.

A few days later I felt an impulse to got a church I don't normally attend.

The neighbour I'd met on the avenue was doing the reading.

It happened to be my favourite reading from Saint Paul.

"Has God changed his mind about his choice of the Jews? Out of the question... Never despise them for they are a cultivated olive and you are a wild olive grafted on to the promises that are theirs... If some of them refusing to hear my message meant I brought the good news of salvation to you, what will their acceptance mean? I tell you nothing less than life from the dead."

Hearing those words from the Brigadier was mightily cheering to my spirit as was the distinct feeling that God had brought me to the church at just the right time to hear them.

what do magpies dream

 

In a flurry of beating wings, eight magpies alighted on the lawn.

There was a good deal of squawking and cackling.

I sat in my kitchen watching them.

One of them seemed to be quickly excluded and flew to a patch of grass a little distance away.

There were now seven.

I could see a particularly vociferous participant with a magpie feather in her beak.

Two others lined up with her facing the remaining four.

There came a cacophony of squawking.

The feather seemed to be the object of interest.

There were lunges and retreats.

The one with the feather brandished it.

Then she took to the air with the others in seeming pursuit.

I thought the whole thing most gracious.

the finest end of reason is to really annoy lefties

 

"I'm a bit surprised," I told the professional woman, "at the way you feminists claim every murder of a woman by Jihadis or gangbangers is actually caused by maleness. You're all up in arms suggesting that it's because they're men that they kill and not because they're Muslims or drug dealers. Yet seven out of the eight most recent murders of women in Ireland were by immigrants. And the media keeps saying: Look, how Irish men treat women. Even when the perpetrators aren't Irish at all."

"James," said the professional woman, "I've worked in this business for twenty years. I've got all the statistics. Crimes against women are usually committed by men."

"I'd like to see those statistics."

"Well I don't have them with me."

"You're all so comfortable with the indictment of men generally," I mused. "You don't like to look at the breakdown of your statistics. It's too inconvenient for your worldview. You can't bear to face the fact that Jihadis and criminals do not murder because of their maleness but because they are Jihadis and criminals."

"The statistics are overwhelming," she said.

As she spoke I recalled to myself a horror story published forty years ago in the British comic magazine 2000 AD. The action took place in one of the magazine's recurring serials called Judge Dredd. Demonic forces had broken into this world from a dark dimension, having observed that all crime was committed by the living. Therefore they decided to make life itself illegal. I would aver that the feminists of today are up to the same thing with their reasoning that statistically most crimes against women are committed by men and therefore the problem itself must be maleness.

"You are setting young people at war with their nature," I ventured. "You are telling young men they are guilty of something just for being men. You are telling women they are perpetual victims of a male oriented society and you are giving them an excuse to be unaware that they are presiding over the most grotesque of atrocities through their acquiescence and participation in abortion culture, euthanasia culture, assisted suicide culture, and of course mutilating sex change culture whereby invasive operations are carried out on children and adults which don't work and never can work."

"James, do you not believe there is a Patriarchy?" she challenged.

I was tempted to ask her to define her terms but that would have been too like a debating manoeuvre.

I took a deep breath and answered thusly.

"I believe the Patriarchy is a conflict theory notion formulated by Marxists to divide us against each other. Marxists seek to divide our societies at every level. They use class conflict theory to divide the rich from the poor. They use race conflict theory to divide blacks from whites. And they use the notion of the Patriarchy, feminist conflict theory, to divide men from women. They hijack legitimate grievances and manipulate facts to weaken our societies fatally. In each case the purpose is to divide and conquer us."

She wasn't too happy with me and she didn't stay long.

As she got up to go I asked her advice about a personal matter.

"You know Pauline has a Palestinian flag fluttering in the window of her house?"

"I do."

"Have I your permission to put graffiti on her wall in large black letters saying Remember Shani Louk. I mean Pauline probably expects me to do it. She'd be disappointed if I didn't really."

The professional woman exclaimed her negative and was gone.