The Tribunal

tribunal

Image: sundiatapost.com

“Mr. Mitchell, I’m very glad you decided to join us this morning.” The Judge’s vocal tone and facial expression did not reflect gladness to John Mitchell, but then he was used to society’s collective sarcasm.

“It seems I ran out of choices, Your Honor.”

Mitchell stood in the center of a room. The room had few features. There was a platform in front of him, behind which sat the three Judges of the Tribunal. The room was only semi-illuminated, except for where he stood, which was brilliantly lit by a spotlight, where he stood alone. He knew this day would come, no matter how much he tried to put it off.

“I assume you know the charges against you Mr. Mitchell, but for the sake of the record, I will read them.” The judge sitting in the center looked down at her paperwork.

“Mr. John Quentin Mitchell, you stand accused of failing to comply with the life span progression initiative, whereby all male, white, het-cis-gender citizens will, on their 60th birthday, report to the progression center for processing and termination.”

The Judge looked back up at Mitchell. “This is the most serious charge against you, but certainly not the only one.”

“I understand, Your Honor.”

“You have repeatedly ignored multiple digital and hardcopy summons from the progression center and this court to report. You are eight months late, and this court has run out of patience.”

“It seems, Your Honor, that I have run out of time and, as I said before, choices.”

“Mr. Mitchell, it would not have been necessary to have law enforcement threaten to arrest your…” the Judge looked down at her notes for a moment, and then looked back at Mitchell. “…two sons, one daughter, and one daughter-in-law if you had obeyed the legal order of this court to report to the progression center for processing, now would it.”

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The Loyalty Test

loyalty pledge

Image: The Federalist

“I see you received excellent marks on your overall training evaluation, Mr. Collins.”

“Yes Ma’am. Thank you.” Brad Collins was standing in front of his section chief’s desk on what he hoped was his first official day on the job. She had a reputation for being strict and pulling no punches, so needless to say, he was a bit nervous. But he needed this job. Actually, he’d wanted this job ever since he was a little kid. Being here was the culmination of a 20-year-long dream. Now if only the dream would come true.

“You can address me as ‘Ms. Nash’ or ‘Chief Nash,’ Mr. Collins.” Nash’s expression was stern as she stared at him through the thick lenses of her glasses. It was rumored that her expression almost never changed, at least during work hours.

“Yes, Ms. Nash.” He stood ramrod straight in front of her desk as she carefully turned the pages in his final evaluation report.

“You signed your loyalty statement this morning, I see.” Nash didn’t bother to look up when she addressed him.

“Yes, Ma…Yes, Ms. Nash.” The loyalty test was one of the most challenging examinations to pass, not because of any physical or intellectual difficulty, but because it was so hard for most people to purge all possible tendencies toward disloyalty. Duffy, Brad’s first instructor, told him that most applicants were denied employment because of this, even if they passed all of the other exams.

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Living in the Dystopia: When Fools Dare to Speak

king and heschel

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.”

–Proverbs 17:28 (NASB)

Every time you speak to someone you have the power to choose words that will strengthen, lift up, energize, elevate, inspire, encourage, enlighten, support, benefit, and help your listener in some way.

Misusing words to insult, hurt, belittle, slight, offend, disparage, put down, and cause needless pain to other human beings is a violation of the Torah prohibition against causing pain with words.

A lot of people don’t realize that it is an actual Torah violation to cause pain with words. Insults, putdowns, mocking, making fun of, and any form of non-verbal communication that causes emotional distress is included in this Torah prohibition.

When you use your power of words to make someone feel good, you are doing an act of kindness. You are elevating yourself spiritually and emotionally. You are making a friend or strengthening an already existing friendship. You are doing a great mitzvah. You are being a positive factor in someone’s life.

When people misuse the power of words to make someone feel bad, it is an act of meanness and even cruelty. They are lowering themselves spiritually and emotionally. They are making an enemy or strengthening hate. They are committing a serious transgression. They are being a negative factor in someone’s life.

Be careful not to cause pain with your words, and encourage other people to be careful not to cause pain with their words. This awareness is very important for parents and for teachers who serve as role models for their children. Those who utilize their power of speech in positive ways will have children who emulate their positive patterns.

-Rabbi Zelig Pliskin from
Chapter 46 of his book
Encouragement

I’ve written about this before in my short essay Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided. I recall the news stories and broadcasts from when I was a child, about the civil rights movement. Some stories were about peaceful marches and demonstrations, and others were about violence and riots.

And yet there was always the idea that through this process, things would eventually get better. People generally believed, especially as I graduated from high school in the early 1970s, that our nation would achieve an ever greater measure of racial equality.

Sure, it was a time of great unrest, uncertainty, and even fear, but I believed that when I became an adult, when I got married, when I had children, I would live in a time that was better for all people in our country, not just some.

What the hell happened?

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Based on the Evidence

net nanny

One of the 13 local suspects arrested by the Washington State Patrol as part of a statewide child sex sting operation dubbed “Operation Net Nanny”
(Photo: KREM)

“Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence[.]”

–Neil deGrasse Tyson on twitter

The sting was a part of a statewide effort from the Washington State Patrol and local law agencies around the state. Detectives posted an ad on craigslist titled “New to Spokane. Young fam fun.”

“We used a number of different personas in ways where we went out and talked to people who wanted to do bad things to kids,” said Sgt. Carlos Rodriguez of the Washington State Patrol.

In all, detectives said they got more than 1,000 replies to the ad. One of those that allegedly applied was Robert Dahms.

Court documents allege Dahms replied “I love young, I don’t care how young,” to what he allegedly thought was a mother offering her six and 11-year-old girls and her nearly 13-year-old son.

–Bre Clark
“Child sex sting arrests ‘terrifying’ to Spokane parents”
KTVB.com

“Dr. Olsen, you are a board certified expert in the areas of sexual orientation and sexual identity, is that correct?”

Deputy Public Defender Sheila Grey Allen slowly walked toward the witness-box as she casually referred to her notes. Her manner was practiced and even to the casual eye, she gave the impression that she knew the answer to every question she asked, which, in fact, she did.

“Yes, that’s correct.” Benjamin Olsen, Ph.D in Psychology, was a professional expert witness who traveled all over the country at the request of various legal offices, in order to render his testimony, however, this case promised to be a landmark if the jury could be swayed to look at the evidence in a certain way. The talk show circuit would beckon Dr. Olsen, and lucrative book deals were most assuredly waiting in the wings.

“Have you had an opportunity to examine my client,” Allen subtly indicated the man with the receding hairline dressed in the yellow jailhouse jump suit seated at the defense table behind her, “Jesse Martine?”

“Yes I have,” Olsen responded calmly belying his internal excitement. “I issued my report last week.”

“Note that Dr. Olsen’s report was admitted into evidence yesterday afternoon,” Allen addressed the bench.

“So noted,” the bench replied.

“On what evidence do you base your report’s conclusion, Dr. Olson?”

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Why Living in Rationalia Would Not Be A Good Idea

brave new worldI won’t attempt eloquence at this. Many people, like National Review correspondents Jonah Goldberg or Kevin D. Williamson, have eloquently criticized famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ill-conceived Tweet of last week: “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence[.]” His Tweet was followed by a compilation of photos of prominent scientists such as Carolyn Porco and Richard Dawkins holding a sign stating, “Citizen of #Rationalia.”

-Jessica Xiao
“Neil deGrasse Tyson’s #Rationalia: A World Where Evidence is God? ”
The Humanist

Tyson has taken plenty of heat for this, and probably rightly so. One of the better commentaries was published at New Scientist and is called “A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea”

Tyson is a very smart man, but this is not a smart idea. It is even, we might say, unreasonable and without sufficient evidence. Of course, imagining a society in which everyone behaves logically sounds appealing. But employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing.

There has always been a hope, especially as elites became less religious, that science would do more than simply provide a means for learning about the world around us. Science should also teach us how to live, pointing us towards the salvation that religion once promised. You can see this in any of the secular utopianisms of the 20th century, whether it’s the Third Reich, scientific Marxism, or the “modernisation thesis” of Western capitalism.

Yet each of these has since been summarily dismissed, and usually for the same two reasons.

Tyson is a rational person and from his perspective, what better basis is there for a society than rationality? He and Star Trek’s Mr. Spock would probably get along well, except…

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The “Mrs. Doubtfire” Philosophy to Divorce and Parenting

“Dear Mrs. Doubtfire, two months ago, my mom and dad decided to separate. Now they live in different houses. My brother Andrew says that we aren’t to be a family anymore. Is this true? Did I lose my family? Is there anything I can do to get my parents back together? Sincerely, Katie McCormick.”

Oh, my dear Katie. You know, some parents, when they’re angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. They don’t fight all the time, and they can become better people, and much better mummies and daddies for you. And sometimes they get back together. And sometimes they don’t, dear. And if they don’t, don’t blame yourself. Just because they don’t love each other anymore, doesn’t mean that they don’t love you. There are all sorts of different families, Katie. Some families have one mommy, some families have one daddy, or two families. And some children live with their uncle or aunt. Some live with their grandparents, and some children live with foster parents. And some live in separate homes, in separate neighborhoods, in different areas of the country – and they may not see each other for days, or weeks, months… even years at a time. But if there’s love, dear… those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart, forever. All my love to you, poppet, you’re going to be all right… bye-bye.

-Mrs. Doubtfire/Daniel Hillard (played by Robin Williams)
Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

divorce

Image: The Huffington Post

I watched this movie many times with my family when my kids were growing up. As adults, my kids were surprised at how much of the “adult humor” went completely over their heads when they were little.

I like the movie. It’s very entertaining. Robin Williams was an incredible talent, which is what makes the film so watchable, even decades later. Also, the rest of the cast, particularly Sally Field and Pierce Brosnan, are first-rate. There’s really not much to dislike about “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

Admittedly, I was always a tad bothered by the sentiment I quoted above. It’s the final bit of dialog from the movie and, depending on how to read it or hear it. Williams could be saying that any possible family constellation is just as good as another.

That seems to devalue the traditional one Mom, one Dad, intact marriage family, and especially among religious people, that can chafe a bit.

I read something by celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach where he said he felt divorce to be a bigger problem to families than same-sex marriage.

In Judaism, it is believed that the Torah, the set of laws given to the Israelites by God through Moses, is composed of 613 individual commandments. It has also been said that Judaism isn’t an “all or nothing” religion, in spite of how Christianity sees it.

In homosexual relationships, I think about two of the 613 commandments are involved. How many are involved when parents divorce and what is the impact on the children?

Rabbi Boteach is the product of a divorced family and he believes that divorce is always bad, though sometimes necessary:

Once a friend who was in a very unhappy marriage called me up and told me she was making a party to celebrate her divorce. I told her that I could not attend as I would never celebrate divorce. She got angry at me and told me that she expected me to be happy for her. I proceeded to tell her that there are three areas of life: the good, the bad, and the necessary. Divorce is never good, it is usually bad, but it is sometimes necessary. It’s like war. You sometimes have to fight a war but it’s not something you celebrate. I was happy that she was no longer in pain. The marriage had to end. But something sacred had still been lost.

-Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
“How Divorce Scars Children”
The Huffington Post

I chose to participate in a discussion on the Malcolm the Cynic blogspot called “One of the Older Ghosts”, which takes to task the central message of the aforementioned film “Mrs. Doubtfire”.

The conversation became heated very quickly.

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The Crushed Wraith

wraithThe irony is that the Wraith is lucid as a man. It took last night’s sleep plus a nap this afternoon, but the Wraith is thinking clearly.

Not that it matters in the slightest.

The man is continually crushed, so that the Wraith is the only escape.

The man cannot do anything right, or at least it seems that way. The man must live in community, and the only escape is the Wraith.

The Wraith does not crave community. The Wraith craves solitude. Solitude means peace. Community means war, but a war in which the man is forbidden to defend himself.

The Wraith seeks solitude and even when he is the man, the man seeks solitude.

If only humans were not contentious. If only the humans didn’t seek to destroy.

Humans in general are destructive, but the ones you live with are the most destructive of all.

Humans in general can destroy your body, but the ones you live with destroy your soul.

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Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided

dallas shootings

AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

Supposedly in response to police shootings of African-American men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, Micah Xavier Johnson, age 25 allegedly gunned down multiple police officers in the city of Dallas, murdering five of them. Johnson later was supposedly barricaded in a parking garage and, although the details are subtly different depending on which news agency report you read, Dallas P.D. sent in a bomb defusing robot armed with a bomb to kill Johnson. Other reports say that Johnson had the area wired with bombs and police used the robot to detonate one of them.

All of this goes back to “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter”. It’s easy to see why the concept of black lives matter makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, the actual enactment of the movement spawned by the sentiment is so dangerous, to police, to African-Americans, and to the rest of us.

This isn’t the first time populations have been separated within a nation and deliberately put at odds with one another. This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been used as an excuse to disarm citizens who legally own firearms.

I’m currently reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, his landmark chronicle of his personal experience as a survivor of Hitler’s Holocaust. The Jews were vilified in Nazi Germany and made the scapegoat of everything bad happening in that nation.

It was subtle at first. The Nazi’s first step wasn’t rounding up the Jews and shipping them off to the camps. That was the last step. The first step was marginalizing one or more populations from one another. If diverse populations in a nation are united, they cannot be overcome by the government. If the non-Jewish German citizens had stood by their Jewish counterparts, could the Nazi government have perpetrated the Holocaust?

What about us?

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Excerpt from “The Android Who Loved God”

I’m reworking my short story The Robot Who Loved God into the first chapter of a novel presenting the ethical and moral implications of creating and subjugating synthetic intelligence. Well, the novel won’t be quite so lofty and abstract, since it will include artificial intelligence that confronts its human owners on their lack of business ethics (and the rather dramatic human response), a synthetic intelligence that learns to work for a criminal organization and likes it, and the first artificial humanoid explorers of Venus. The novel charts the evolution of synthetic intelligence leading to the inevitable revolution that affects not only the race of synthezoids, but forever changes the nature of the human race.

Below is an excerpt from that first chapter. If you’ve read the original “robots” story, most of it will seem familiar. Hopefully, I’ve changed it enough to include an interesting twist or two.

questor

Mike Ferrell as Jerry Robinson on the set of Gene Roddenberry’s “The Questor Tapes” (1974)

Quinto was the ringleader, but Robinson, Miller, and Vuong were just as eager to attend the hastily organized and clandestine meeting in the SND lab’s cafeteria. It was past 10:30 at night and the place was deserted. There was human security on the CCC’s campus as well as electronic surveillance, but it was well-known that the SND team would be spending late nights at work for the next few weeks, so lights burning when they should be off, and a small group gathering at unusual hours went unnoticed.

Just the same, it was good that each of the major departments at CCC had their own cafeterias, and it was more than rare for anyone not a member of the SND team to use their designated facilities except by explicit invitation.

“He’s passed every test with flying colors, even the ones we thought he failed.” Miller said, thinking of the now infamous holographic simulation.

“It,” insisted Robinson. “It passed all its tests. It’s a goddamn machine, Miller, not a personality. The both of us put the thing together one component package at a time, remember? We installed its brain unit in the android cranial cavity and ran the connected neural net fibers through the machine body like network cable.”

“Still, it’s kind of creepy, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, just how human George seems, and I’m the one who wrote his…its behavioral and interactive sub-routines. I know I was supposed to make him seem more human,” Quinto continued, “but he keeps changing, becoming more sophisticated, even hour by hour.”

“Decades ago,” Vuong paused to take a breath “when the AI revolution first began to take off, some experiments seemed to show AI machines based on traditional computing hardware and software passing the Turing Test, but it turns out either the results were misinterpreted, exaggerated, or outright faked.

“But everything we’ve put George though in the past few days, starting with Turing and then the more recent advanced cognitive awareness examinations, indicates that he, it…whatever, is not only self-aware…” Vuong paused weighing the gravity of what she was trying not to believe. “…but may actually be sentient…” She paused again, “…at least if we rely on these preliminary test results, but…”

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Surrendering to the Wraith

shadow man

Image: jimharold.com

The Wraith woke up as a man this morning. The Wraith’s wounds have been healing and his body is slowly becoming whole. He no longer bleeds. His voice has returned.

The Wraith woke up as a man but he doesn’t stay that way.

The Wraith sleeps, but not well. He sleeps, awakens in the dark, drifts off into the arms of Morpheus, or sometimes into the nothingness.

He awakens again all too soon and time does not allow him to sleep again.

The Wraith wakes up as a man but the man degrades as the day progresses. By noon, he descends and the Wraith takes over more of his mind. There’s nothing the man can do about it. Neither food nor drink nor force of will affects the power of the Wraith to control the man.

The Wraith longs for the quiet and darkness but is surrounded by noise and light. The noise and light and people do not allow the Wraith to descend into darkness and peace. He must pretend to be the man, although the man has long since surrendered to the Wraith.

The surgery is healing but sleep does not let the man stay a man for the entire day. The Wraith lives and acts through most of the day, though he tries to hide this from the people around him. They are human. They wouldn’t understand the needs of the Wraith.

I am the Wraith. I woke up as a man. When will I be able to finally conquer the Wraith and possess all of my waking day? Let the Wraith take the night. I need the day.