Your All-Day Doom-Sucker Lollipop, Fresh From the Shelves of the Candied Rat Poison Store

I, No-Bot promise you that today's entry is in no way created by artificial intelligence.  In fact, I can proudly assert that it IS being created by a human of far less intelligence than many other humans.  If this sounds nuts, just wait a few years when you'll be begging for anything still available with a human touch.

The barrage of happy, happy, happy TV and radio commercials surrounding Thanksgiving this year seem phonier than last year's crop, and I urge you to remember my advice:  If you like something advertised, find the same product produced by a less obvious competitor, because that item is probably cheaper, better and produced by well-paid employees whose paychecks won't be diminished by the high cost of media-drenched advertising.

But I, No-Bot digress.  As 2025 draws to a close, a cesspool of brain-damaged issues rattle around in my head, where plenty of vacant space remains to take in even more.  For instance -- why are we still here?  Why is our species not extinct?  We've had our time and what future remains for us consists of running out of landfills, poisoning every good water source on the planet, ruining food sources and a continuation of killing off animals and plants as we forge ahead to our own destruction.  I mean, sooner or later the only things left to decimate will be us, and that should be relatively easy the way weaponry, international tensions and basic human attachment to war exemplify us as a species.

The implications of artificial general intelligence and its truly dangerous successor, artificial super intelligence, currently fall on clusters of ears which will not hear the warnings.  We hope somebody is making a collection of news clips and TV videos where experts assure us that AI will always be our friend -- you know, a little something the next generation can play as its basics of life are commandeered or forbidden by the AI in charge of human existence and obliteration.  And who gets to use energy?  Why, AI of course.

Another thing bothering me about this whole AI business is these kids who suicide themselves on the advice of AI -- or, for that matter, at the urging of a girlfriend or boyfriend.  When these felo-de-se actions occur, instead of putting the blame (and, oh yes, the multi-million dollar lawsuits to kiss and make better something) on Internet AI companies, why not just acknowledge that the victim is a victim of his or her own troubled mind? In other words, there was already plenty of something wrong in that brain long before the Internet scooped it up.

Speaking of taking one's own life -- who wouldn't think it these days?  College students sign for debt they can never pay off and AI is already taking away a good share of the jobs young people are supposedly training for (joke's on you).  Social Security's future is far from certain and far beyond that should be the realization that the products AI will be making instead of previously fired humans won't be purchased because people without jobs can't buy anything.  It's no wonder that young people in uncomfortable numbers feel, albeit wrongly, that socialism is their ticket to freedom.

The holy book thumpers among us in particular scream panic because the international population is decreasing, unable to keep up the growing numbers.  I believe part of this event, in addition to Internet alternatives to baby-making, is related to people simply stepping back and realizing the cost and trouble as opposed to benefits just don't seem worthwhile.  Anybody still believing the world can be harnessed in layers of love, sex and proliferation of baby production is full of shit.  Consider the escalation of child abuse. With the world of high tech working overtime to keep every human alive forever while most religions and governments do their best to champion additions to the arsenal of babies, the enterprise of infant supplementation becomes meaningless to potential parents and modern society.  How many people is too many?  We understand why heterosexual relationships have taken such a dive.  Our ecosystem is trashed and there simply is no interest in actual romantic encounters which range from awkward to, yes, injurious or murderous.

If there's a bright spot -- and there isn't really -- there are people still making lots of babies every day:  Radical Islamists around the world and right here in the good old used-to-be USA.  That is, we don't seem very united as states anymore, but we do tend to agree and disagree a lot as Americans, which is our cherished right.

Nobody living faithfully under the American Constitution should want the slightest anything to do with radical Islam and Sharia Law.  Sharia is popping up around the U.S. as fast as mosques occupied by ??? and government officials need to make certain that Sharia never gets a foothold in the country (as it has in other nations devoid of a firewall constitution).  When Texas declared the organization C.A.I.R. essentially terrorists this year, of course the complicit media went wild with cries of unfairness.  Truth is, C.A.I.R is an American derivative of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared as criminals by Egypt years ago.  What does Egypt know that we do not?

Islamists get off rather easily in American society, as so many fear their wrath and will say nothing controversial.  Me?  I wish every high school, college, university, club and TV station in the USA would sponsor a "Draw the Prophet Mohammad" contest in which all participants throughout the country are encouraged to draw their impression of Mohammad's brutal, child-abusing pedophile face, the more insane looking the better so we may at least establish some modicum of reality.  It is, you see, against Islamic law to produce any image of Mohammad.  The man must remain absolutely invisible.  Is that because of his crimes, or is blind reverence so important that one must hide the object of one's crazed affections away from public scrutiny?  Don't, please, give me that old, old, old time religion!

I think we are in a kind of trouble that may not abate. Sunday night's "60 Minutes" (CBS-TV) showed us brilliant high school students using CRISPR (we have mentioned this previously) to produce cures for illness.  One student did mention something about the ethics which must be ascribed to such technology -- which is a valid point because any dog on the street should be smart enough by now to know that CRISPR will also be implemented by those who wish to produce viruses able to kill off segments of human society, if not all.

American society seems to believe all ills can be cured by flooding our lives with sports.  One can hardly get away from football alone on TV.  Then again, athletics have a long tradition of high school and college coaches steering players in the right direction and -- oops, until that coach who was downloading and trading child porn left his house with a gun after discovery by the cops. And then there's the sports gambling scandal with the Mafia.  Mafia?  They still around?

Not to forget UFOs.  Right now, government officials of merit are wrestling with "disclosure" of information indicating that yes, they are real.  I wish Trump would just come out and say it.  Get it over with.  We have plenty of other things to panic in the streets about.  Of course, the major problem here is that religion and UFOs don't always go hand in hand, to say the least.  Many among The Faithful won't cater kindly to being told a choice must be made based upon evidence.  God is this or God is that or God. . .may not be what they think or. . .may not have been.  Period.  This is the sort of thing to bring trouble in the streets of, especially, the Third World.  Or until religion's officials can prop up some absurd explanation that suits the revelations about these enigmas that claim the skies, lakes, rivers and oceans at will.

My final proof that we hover on the brink of annihilation?  The new season of NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Live."  Horrible writing, just infantile and unwatchable for the very most part.  Maybe they'll cancel it and substitute more football.  It really doesn't matter. Just keep on licking that lollipop and hope the next lick releases a calming sedative.

War Plus Sex Equals No War?

The U.S. Air Force has a proud tradition defending the country, though I wasn't necessarily at the top of the heap myself when I enlisted in the sixties and screwed up in basic training enough to set me back for two agonizing weeks of repeating absurd rituals that made no sense at all.  The training instructors seemed unwilling to accept the fact that I was only in the USAF because the wretched Vietnam military draft just about had me in its claws.  Anyway, after medical tech school the Air Force and nation got 110 percent out of me in hospitals, so that was that.  I saw some pretty crazy things whilst working in the military hospital atmosphere, and if I ever get around to rewriting and firming up an unpublished book manuscript I produced decades ago I'll lay out a chain of forgettable events designed to bore the reader to sleep.

However, few anecdotes about Air Force life and accomplishments can rival a serious consideration surfacing in the nineties to manufacture a "gay bomb."  What was it?  Apparently, it wasn't actually produced, but would have been a non-lethal weapon relying upon a spraying of sex pheromones intended to make enemy soldiers develop a sexual attraction to one another, thereby blowing military bearing and disciplined war efforts all to hell.

The ultimate conclusion after many studies indicated that such a bomb was unlikely to effect the desired results, and the whole project was shelved.  At least, we think it was.

But I have more confidence in the idea  than some, and I say to Secretary of War -- SOW?? of all things -- Pete Hegseth that he must remove the gay bomb idea from Air Force mothballs, perfect it with reckless abandon at all costs, and then use the weapon to make enemy military members all gay every time war erupts.  Can't you just imagine how we could go into Venezuela, bomb the fascist dictator's currently available 200,000 active duty soldiers into utter and total gayness, and then simply walk in as the Venezuelan troops busy themselves with one another?

I'm sure Hegseth and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other examples of hand-picked manly men and maybe manly women are already constrained by a hesitancy to embrace anything remotely gay, but the beauty of the gay bomb is its use on the enemy, not on our troops.  Well, unless some WANT to stand downwind from the explosion.

Obviously, the other advantage is clear:  The gay bomb is not designed to make one trans in any way.  If one is a heterosexual soldier turned temporarily homosexual, he won't simultaneously become transitioned to an opposite gender.  No men claiming to be little girls or stuff like that.  This will be a winner at the White House.

Talk about ingenuity!  Maybe you remember the neutron bomb, engineered to kill people but leave structures totally intact.  Wow, that was impressive enough -- but the gay bomb is the next step, where no lives will be lost and no buildings destroyed.  Which is great because gay-bombed troops will need those buildings for brief but private romantic encounters.  At least for a few hours, enemy troops will say thank you for bombing us, Secretary Hegseth, you've made our day.  And. . .President Trump did say, did he not, that he wanted to stop the killing?  With the gay bomb -- mission accomplished!


(If an administration headed up (supposedly) by one J. R. Biden could, with the able assistance of one A. J. Fauci, perpetrate upon the American people face masks that provided little to no protection against Covid -- as Americans were condemned merely for choosing not to wear them -- then the definition of impossible becomes murky.  If an administration can lie to us, make us stay three or six feet away from one another in consultation with no scientific basis whatsoever, and close schools, businesses and outside basketball courts for months merely because its near-fascist manipulators wielded an assumed power to deny established constitutional rights, then surely there's a gay bomb somewhere in our future.)

The Icemen Cometh

 

A Cosmic Joke?

As billions of dollars continue to be spent by superpowers on space travel and valiant efforts to get from here to someplace called Out There, it's interesting to note that more than a smattering of scientists are reconsidering the origin of life -- human life in particular -- and the very real possibility that life did not originate on Earth.

Decades of scientific studies involving asteroids, meteorites and comets have discovered what appear theoretically to be the "building block" chemicals necessary to create living matter.  The beginnings of human life may indeed have come from Mars via a meteorite impact which flung chemical substances into space and onto Earth -- but the basic chemicals and necessary interactions likely occurred billions of years ago far elsewhere, raising the obvious conclusion that pieces of space rock have always transported and likely continue to convey said building blocks of life throughout the universe.

If we came from someplace else (which I have long believed, circumstances unknown), isn't it funny how we labor and strive essentially to go back to where we started?  A place or places which likely don't even exist anymore?  Are we ultimately just shooting ourselves in the foot with the potential futility of space technology?  Wouldn't it be something if we really have nowhere "new" to go, despite the vastness of space?

Chip away:  As long as I'm in pursuit of a negative course today (if not always) -- what's with building all of these expensive digital chip plants and crushing perfectly good farmland and animal habitats, when based upon much of our technological experience it should only be another three or four years before we can produce the damned things at home in our basements?

Warm Letters and Form Letters

 (A pre-election note regarding NY City:  The far left of the Democrat Party is drooling over the more than likely prospect that a democratic socialist with clear Islamic ties is poised to assume power as the mayor of a once great but quickly declining city.  As others have warned far more eloquently than I could, when you (Democrats, I mean you) invite the Third World into a country without borders this is what you get.  I've heard that some 50 percent of NY city dwellers are from somewhere else, and obviously these folks will vote for that which closely approximates their core values -- or they're just swallowing promises of "tax the rich and get free stuff."  As goes New York City next week, so goes the rest of NY eventually, and then the rest of the nation, should California and other pathetically progressive states latch on to this madness.  Sharia Law (look it up) already seems to be making inroads into American society, absolutely in opposition to our constitutional freedoms and rights, and with the help of outside and inside influences the possibility of utter chaos in the streets one day is not a nightmarish fantasy.  In NYC the obvious choice for mayor is Curtis Sliwa, but in panic mode the nevertheless execrable Andrew Cuomo should be the winner.  But neither is likely to take the NY mayoral oath of office, pushed aside as they probably will be by a presumed Marxist-socialist-radical Islamic philosophy destined to threaten all that we hold dear.  Trouble is, a large segment of NYC voters either don't have a clue -- or they do, and if that's the case we're in terrible jeopardy.)

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We've long bemoaned society's estrangement from letters written specifically and personally from one sender to one receiver.  Instead, the computer has replaced the personality of an individually targeted word, and simply by directing a digital device to send the exact same letter to thousands with only names and addresses added, those receiving such documents often falsely believe they're receiving the personal touch.

As a kid, one Christmas in the early sixties I received a basic manual typewriter as a gift and as years passed I used that marvelous instrument to pound out letter after letter to government representatives and others in my quest to raise public interest in the UFO issue.  Yes, there would be other typewriters and when, as an adult, I could actually purchase a couple of IBM Selectric typewriters I was literally in keyboard heaven.  Unfortunately, in so many ways, the computer sprung into use and my previous existence requiring ink to be imbedded on an actual sheet of paper as I typed character by character was shattered all to hell.

And so it had been in the sixties and even into the seventies that I could typewrite a letter, stick it into an envelope, add a stamp and mail it off, confident of a response in kind.  As readers of this blog, you know only too well of my "correspondence flood," as I've posted oh so many scans of letters received, particularly in the earliest years of these entries.

On one occasion, when one could write any congressional rep in the country and get a reply (now, of course, we're pretty much confined to communication with our own representatives, especially when e-mail is used), I wrote the late Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen.  Admired and respected throughout Congress, Dirksen was noted as a pretty fair orator with a voice commanding, yet as smooth as warm butter at a summer's day picnic.  Indeed, my mother, not particularly intrigued by politics but certainly aware of the country's historical foundations loved Dirksen's voice.

Nor did Dirksen let his vocal talents go to waste.  In the sixties he joined with a record company to produce his LP album, "Gallant Men," a recorded version of American history events read by Dirksen himself.  I was actually unaware of the LP until a fellow Air Force airman and I visited a department store one afternoon and as I thumbed through their record section I became aware of its presence.  Marc saw the record, too. "My dad would sure like to have that," he remarked.  Hmm.  Should I turn it over to him as a gesture of kindness?  Wouldn't it be the Christian thing to do, I wondered for a moment?

No, I decided to risk burning in hell and insisted I was keeping the album, and I did.  I hope Marc found another copy, but it surely wouldn't happen at this store because their records appeared to be a mix of cast-offs -- new and sealed, but apparently not popular in regular record stores.  Sorry Marc, I loved you like a brother. . .

But -- Dirksen.  The point is, I sent a self-typed letter and received one back.  Some secretary had to sit down at a typewriter and bang out real words intended for one person, moi!  No form letter intended for the masses, no wordy campaign speech woven around my reason for writing, no bull crap.  What I received back was exactly the answer I needed and nothing more 0h-- with a penned signature!  At that time, I don't know that autopens were in fashion, so either I had a letter signed by the senator himself or by a trusted office secretary authorized to do so.  In any case, the letter seemed real, warm and to the point.  No more, those days!

Yes, it would have been great if Dirksen had taken another step and brought the UFO issue up in the Senate -- but maybe he or his office communicated with other officials as a result, leading to further interest in the future (I'm trying not to picture the Colorado UFO study disaster as a fruit of my labor. . .).  Actually, if you dig up a copy (or visit the NICAP tribute site -- see my link) of NICAP's "UFO Evidence" report, given to every member of Congress in 1964, you will find a section devoted to numerous comments about UFOs by congressional members.  If only they had formed a powerful coalition then -- though it is amazing that several modern congressional folk have finally taken UFOs seriously and into the conference room.

Nonetheless, I so miss those earlier days of friendly interpersonal communication via the post office, pretty much lacking a hidden agenda.  If we anticipate something better from artificial intelligence and the magic of computer chips, I fear we shall be profoundly disappointed.  Then again, it's quite true that if one never had something in the first place they tend not to notice its departure from long ago.